Customer Reviews

Evolutionary Game Theory

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Weibull's "Evolutionary Game Theory" has earned a distinguished place in many bookshelves for good reason: It is rigorous and never short of intuition. That said, however, this book is not the first item in the reading list of a beginner.

If you are interested in learning evolutionary game theory and your previous exposure to non-cooperative game theory and ordinary differential equations has been limited, do not start with Weibull's Evolutionary Game Theory. Consider first visiting Herbert Gintis's "Game Theory Evolving" and Maynard Smith's classic "Evolution and the Theory of Games"

For the 'technical' reader this book still is not a walk in the park becasue Weibull walks the reader not only in a math garden but also exposes the reader to several important evolutionary concepts including but not limited to 'evolutionary stability','evolutionarily stable strategy', 'replicator dynamics', 'population dynamics'. Grasping both the theoretical concepts and how they are modelled takes some thinking and patience.

Overall this is a must reader for the seriously involved and can be the single item for many students of this subject that takes them to a higher plane of understanding.

After one makes it through umpteen refinements of Nash equilibria, the book becomes fascinating. Many ideas of Darwinism became much clearer -they got a quality of unavoidability so to speak- than when I read books on Darwinism before.
I found the level of mathematical sophistication needed rather unchallenging, without being boring - and I am not a "deep core" mathematician, but an engineer.

Highly recommendable

During the work on my master thesis ("Learning in strategic games") i bought several books about the topic. This one was the hardest to understand and to apply to anything practical. I guess this one is for "hard core" mathematicians.

I'm a computer sciences engineer working on my phd thesis that is related with game thoery. I found the book difficult to read. Forget about following an entire chapter if you are weak on differential equations.