Customer Reviews

Game Theory Evolving

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Herb Gintis is an economist with a strong interest in the assumptions we make about human rationality in our social, political, and economic theories. He has produced a remarkable and deceptively innovative text that could productively be used in a broad range of fields.

The topic of game theory is interesting to many people because it describes interaction between competitors, presumably helping us pick the best strategy if the circumstances are well enough understood. We might wonder whether the circumstances are well enough understood in daily life to apply the methods of game theory to our own choices, since it usually to assume that we are rational competitors trying to maximize our own gain.

Game Theory Evolving addresses this fascinating question not from a theoretical perspective so much as giving the reader the tools for investigating it themselves in two distinct but complementary ways.

First, it provides practical problem-oriented chapters for learning the principles and thinking in terms of game theoretic methods. The problems are not the usual textbook "who cares, anyway ?" type. Rather they are fun and interesting to solve and often lead to direct insights into real situations.

Second, it extends game theory into the realm of evolutionary thinking, so we not only understand strategic action but we get some deeper insight into how our historical needs shaped our behavior and even our thought processes. Game theory may help explain how we learned to cooperate and why under some conditions we tend to punish cheaters and treat people fairly even though it provides no apparent advantage to us.

Disguised as a lowly academic textbook, Game Theory Evolving is actually a basic toolkit, a passport into the remarkable modern study of evolutionary thinking about human nature, through a practical grounding in the mathematical techniques that have the potential to join our understanding of social sciences and biology.

Game Theory has to be taught with a strong enphasis on the developing the problem solving capabilities of the students, Nevertheless, the books you can find out there are very strong in the math and the theory but weak, incomplete, and poor in the problems. This is the first book I could find where the enphasis is made on the problems and on developing the capacities of the reader/student in the field, not just for theoretical purposes, where problems are more than useful, but also in the empirical aplications of game theory. Theory in this book emerges from the problems since all the chapters are developed as problems in themselves. It has also the probably the first extensive treatment in a textbook of evolutionary game theory. Given that this new field has become one of extensive research in the field lately, this becomes a major contribution to the teaching of game theory. And the best part is that is fun to read!

This is a terrific introductory textbook for game theory students, especially those lacking microeconomic background. The abundance of solved exercises help illustrate concepts that, if only explained conceptually, are likely to leave the reader confused. I'd recommend this for beginning students. For the students with more background, I'd recommend Osborne and Rubinstein. Only the students comfortable with the math should use Fudenberg/Tirole or Myerson.

I'm puzzled by the some of the criticisms presented here: all the notations are standard for the field and the basic concepts are laid out as clearly as any other text. If anything, the solved examples clarify the concepts much better than usual. At least one of the reviews (the review below) makes so little sense that makes me wonder if he even understood what he was reading: he's throwing about irrelevant jargon from communication theory (which has nothing to do with the basic game theory that the text mostly concerns itself with, especially the simple-minded example he's supposedly critiquing.). I'd pick this as the textbook for my intro class any day.

Having said that, the "evolving" in the title is somewhat misleading. This is a fairly introductory text for generic game theory, not really the evolutionary game theory which is more complicated creature. Gintis touches on some topics and provides some illustrations--more than most "basic" game theory texts, in fact, but not in depth. To learn the real deal, you will need more advanced texts such as Weibull. On the other hand, of course, they are much denser and will make a lot less sense.

Gintis is not a well-known popular economist, but he deserves wider readership; he has been carefully analysing and dissecting orthodox economic theory and contemporary capitalism for some years with some interesting results. He is actually one of those rare economists, who actually knows how to use Mathematics in an appropriate fashion.This bookis a great introduction to Game Theory and its evolving developments, easily accessible to a wide number of non-economists, and will certainly be of interest to economists and sociologists. Definitely worth reading!

I am using this book for independent study of Game Theory.

The pros. The problems in the book are excellent. They range from easy to fairly difficult, and manage to cover most nooks and crannies needed for a thorough introduction to contemporary game theory, with some evolutionary and economics background for good measure. For professors, I think this is a good book to use to prepare a class. It has the examples one needs to set up a "zone of proximal development", meaning, an exposition in which one leads the students bit by bit toward better mastery of the ideas. In fact, the choice of problems, the flow from one vignette to another, and the interweaving of problems with important theoretical concepts and expositions leave the impression that the book is closely based on Prof. Gintis's lecture notes.

The cons. The blessing is also the curse: the book reads like a chalkboard with commentary rather than like a textbook. If you are expecting the familiar cadence of background - theory - examples - problems, you will not find it here. This can be refreshing, but takes getting used to. A more serious drawback is that solutions at the end of the book are very sketchy, so beginners will find it difficult to connect all the dots without outside help. Students expecting a more thorough style are likely to find the book infuriating.

In brief, the quality of material is high, but the treatment could have used a once- or a twice-over. Solid reference, very good for preparing a class, but if you are using it for home study, have someone to call on when you get stuck on a problem. Also, if you are a mathematically competent social scientist, I would recommend another book in parallel, such as Hargreaves-Heap & Varoufakis "Game Theory - A Critical Text". While Gintis is very hands-on, Hargreaves-Heap and Varoufakis spend much more time on warranted and unwarranted assumptions game theory makes about human psychology, as well as epistemological concerns - details needed to understand how the theory fits within social sciences. These two books complement each other quite well.

This book is not for babies, and you cannot simply read it like a novel. But for a self-motivated person who is curious about game theory, it is without parallel! The explanations are complete but not belabored, and the problems are graded from simple to very challenging. The more challenging problems are solved in the back of the book--about a third of the book is devoted to anwswers! Try it--you'll like it.

Oy, so, as a collection of *a lot* of problems, it's great; and that makes it pretty great. By any other standard, and for any other use than reference (to problems, not ideas), it's junk, however, hardly approaching the normal standards of Princeton's UP, I've gotta think.
There are numerous errors in the problems (I haven't seen any in the answers yet and the monkey problem other reviewers criticize is correct). I happened to skip to Markov chains, for example, and not only was there a pair of typographical errors (some mis-TEXing; not the author's fault, I suppose), but also a mistake in the first example after the description.
The good news is he's fixed the mistakes and gone and written a whole new chapter on "markov economies" and posted it all online. Better news would be a new, more carefully edited, edition, or at least a separate file online of corrections, so one doesn't have to search your (yeah, he seems be active on Amazon) new-made chapters, with their unfortunate numbering conventions (putting two-sentence problems on the same stratum as solution concepts results in some inconvenience & incoherence).
Beyond these editing errors, the book seems to be heavy on text and short on rigor (at least outside of big blocks of text, that is), and citations (he doesn't like other game theorists!). The organization is also poor, even within chapters; as mentioned above a new chapter was inserted since publication.

So, in summary,
Pros: includes originality (he hates theorists of game theory proper!) for the uninitiated, and lots of examples and a website with corrections and updates
Cons: useless for reading, learning or teaching from, etc.

Okay, so no, he doesn't hate game theorists; he just tries hard to evolve his way out of the ambiguities of "classical" game theory. Needless to say, evolution is hard to do on one's own.

This book makes game theory available to all behavioral scientists, including biologists, economists, and others interested in how humans and animals behave and interact. Each chapter begins at a quite elementary level, and advances a a leisurely pace. The user can stop and go on to the next chapter at his or her will. There are answers to many of the problems, especially the more challenging ones, in the last third of the book.

This is a very creative endeavor, written by someone who obviously loves the material and want others to love, and use, game theory as well. It is not written for theorists, but rather for prospective users, which accounts for the strong problem orientation. Anyone who thinks they can master game theory without doing LOTS of problems is deluding him or herself. Dive in!

Gintis, a true polymath, suggests that the mathematical methods of the social sciences, which include cooperative and non-cooperative game theory and social choice theory, have the potential to elevate social and political discourse above ideological debate. This book, which focuses on problems and solutions in non-cooperative game theory, is a contribution to this effort. I myself would like to see the end of the non-mathematical political pundit. Game Theory Evolving should be considered required reading not only for anyone interested in game theory, but for anyone who aspires to some depth of understanding in the social and political sciences.

Other reviewers have written detailed reviews of chapters. I wish to make and defend a claim: the book presupposes more mathematical sophistication than its modest statement of prerequisites suggests. The presence of unstated assumptions and prerequisites cannot be justified by arguing that rigor should be left to mathematicians. I am inclined to conclude that Gintis is more mathematically talented than he is willing to admit, to the extent that his intuition encompasses the statement of theorems that others ordinarily have to learn and internalize. As such, the book serves as motivation for further study. For example, Ross' Introduction to the Theory of Probability, up to the chapter on conditional expectation, would serve as a reference for the following problem, which even occurs in Gintis' notes on mathematics for the humanities!

The problem is the guessing game. A number k in the interval [1, n] is chosen--you don't know which one it is. You attempt to guess the number k, uniformly at random. You are told whether you are correct, high or low. The problem is to find the expected number of guesses before you are correct. (A computer scientist would expect log_2(n) guesses, which is asymptotically correct.) In the solution, Gintis introduces the conditional expectation f(n k) of the number of guesses of a number in [1, n] given that the first number guessed is k. This conditional expectation breaks into three cases: you were correct on the first guess with probability 1/n; you were high with probability (n-k)/n; and you were low with probability (k-1)/n. These probabilities are used to define a recursion equation for the conditional expectation. There is one subtlety here: if you are low, your next guess will be in the interval [k+1, n]. This is not an interval of the form [1, j] for some j, but one may assume that the expected number of guesses is translation invariant. That is, we may assume that the expected number of guesses in [1, n] equals the expected number of guesses in [1+j,n+j] for any j. What matters is the ordinal rank, and not the cardinal values. Perhaps this is an example where rigor interferes--though it would not be excessively pedantic to mention it.

Next, Gintis says that "we know that" f(n), the expected number of guesses, is the sum for k = 1 to n of f(n|k) times 1/n. Well, how do we know this? It might be obvious, but in case it isn't, it is a special case of the double expectation theorem (cf. Ross), which states E[X] = E[E[X|K=k]], where X and K are random variables defined on the same probability space, and where E[X|K=k] is the conditional expectation. My point is that neither translation invariance nor the double expectation theorem are mentioned. Applying these principles reflexively seems to involve more sophistication than Gintis lets on. I am unconvinced that stating them would amount to introducing into a text of applied mathematics a level of rigor properly assigned to texts of pure mathematics. While they are trivial principles in the mathematical scheme of things, they have nontrivial consequences. Gintis does provide some mathematical background in the book. But in my experience as an uncompensated journal reviewer, this background is not enough to work some of the problems in a book whose stated purpose is to teach game theory through problem solving.

This particular problem isn't typical of game theory problems--it's a probability theory problem. Why did I choose it? Seasoned reviewers will often select in the text under consideration some specific question, and suggest that it counts as a metaphor for some larger question. Since I am entering this expansive stage as a reviewer, let me suggest that the guessing game problem, although not illustrative of most of the problems in the book, is nevertheless illustrative of the state of game theory. Getting the epistemic assumptions of game theory right is an open research question. Several practitioners have written books on the subject, Gintis included. Sooner or later the reader will come up against the unstated assumptions and uncertainties of a scientific field undergoing vigorous development. The problem of the guessing game is a toy example for which the assumptions can be spelled out mathematically. But there remain scientific questions whose formalization has yet to be conclusively settled, despite an extensive and distinguished literature, such as the formalization of the epistemic states of the players. The reconciliation of theory with the empirical findings of behavioral economics is an active area of research--among many open questions.

So the reader should not be discouraged by the occasional mathematical leaps. Instead, less experienced readers should regard them as invitations to broaden their mathematical background in the service of an applied subject. This mathematics is a new frontier, and I can think of no better introduction to it. In the same aggressively Panglossian spirit with which economists proclaim that Western liberal democratic capitalism is the best system we have (and by implication, that nothing better is conceivable), I asseverate that there really is no viable alternative to Game Theory Evolving.

The company that sent the copy of the book did not even bother to include the bill. The book came in an envelope; not packaged as a standard Amazon book. Perhaps SOME COMPANIES rate countries and act accordingly. Some countries are rated below some criteria, so send in an envelope, the US? the UK? Canada? send in a box. I repeat, this applies to the company that sent me the book; not all companies working with Amazon.

As to the book, I believe that the chapter 11 on dynamical systems separates the book from other game theory texts. The emphasis upon evolutionary game theory is a particularly commended attempt. The answers to exercises are detailed and exceptionally helpful.

However, the level of the book is a bit imprecise: it is definitely not an introductory text. Readers should have some game theory expertise. I believe that any addition of easier exercises would help the book to wet the appetite of many readers eager to learn some evolutionary game theory.