Customer Reviews

Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

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

 

 

This is a frustrating book to review because it so variable. Clearly Ken Binmore knows much about his subject and there are moments when the book comes alive with insights and crystal clear explanations. You want to cheer. By the time I had finished I knew a lot more about Game Theory than when I started, as is the case with most titles in this excellent series from Oxford. But then you continually hit rather over condensed technical explanations which clearly mean a lot to Ken Binmore, but leave the general reader floundering. He finds it difficult I suspect to put himself in the other's shoes and his editor did not push him hard enough to be clear.The book would benefit from either a technical glossary of key terms used or concise and clear boxed definitions in the text of, for example, Nash Equilibrium. There is not a lot of doubt in this book, which sometimes comes over as arrogant. His dismissal of probably the most useful (to a professional negotiator like myself) book on bargaining 'Getting to Yes' is telling: 'This best seller argues that good bargaining consists of insisting on a fair deal. Thinking strategically is dismissed as a dirty trick!'This misses the fundamental point of Getting to Yes: Interest based bargaining and expanding the size of the pie to be divided creatively. I hope his dismissal of others he disagrees with (and with whom I am less familiar) is more balanced and realistic. Yet there is clearly a very interesting, well informed, intelligent Ken Binmore there to be had, but not consistently. His short explanations of evolutionary game theory and reciprocity are exemplary. And this book made me want to read some of his other work, to see if he is more balanced when he has more space. When he is not being flip his bibliography is outstanding. On balance I would still say: read it!

I avoid writing negative reviews, but am willing to do so when there is a need to warn other readers about wasting time and money on a book. This book presents one such occassion.

The problem is simply that this book works very poorly as an introduction. The early parts of the book fail to provide the lay of the land, definitions of terms are unclear, many topics are poorly explained, and all sorts of necessary details are missing.

I see that another reviewer loved the book, but I also get the impression that this reviewer already has some background in game theory (which I don't). Readers with that background might find this book to be a fun and breezy review since they can fill in the missing content but, again, the problem is that this book purports to be an introduction.

Lest anyone think that the real problem was that this book was over my head, I'll just note that I'm an engineer, and I've done fine with plenty of books dealing with math, science, and other analytic subjects, many of which are a good bit more advanced than Binmore's.

I had to cut my losses and abandon this book about a third of the way through, and I'll now be looking again for a game theory book which is genuinely a proper introduction. After reading such a book, perhaps I'll come back to Binmore's book and see if I can get more out of it.

Put me down with those who think this book is too much for an introduction. It clocks in at 175 pages, but I almost think it should have been longer to allow for more explanations (the text feels compressed in many places). For many of the key ideas that repeat throughout the book (e.g. Nash equilibrium, subgame perfect, maximin) I found myself flipping back to re-read original explanations, which weren't clear enough to sink in the first time through. And does the general reader really need graphs like the ones on, say, page 144?

That being said, there's a lot of important information here that you should know. With explanations of the Game of Chicken, Prisoner' Dilemma, Winner's Curse and the Monty Hall problem, this could have been a fun book. Too bad Binmore tried to do too much with it.

I read Prisoner's Dilemma by Poundstone and mustered up enough interest to dip my toe into Game Theory. This VSI called to me from the library shelves and I settled in. Now I'm a technical sort with background in Math & Engineering, and I sailed through the first few pages. All of a sudden, Binmore went ape and waded into the deep end with all sorts of jargon, casual reference to terms not previously defined and I began to sweat. But gamely (ha ha) I persevered and probably made some headway with Nash Equilibria.

But Binmore would have none of that. I read the caption for Figure 14 and threw in the towel. The graph shows "Evolutionary Adjustment in the Ultimatum Minigame" and concludes by asserting that "The other Nash equilibria ... all require the use of the weakly dominated strategy /no/, but (the set) N still has a large basin of attraction in the case of the replicator dynamics".

Binmore 1, Reader 0. Game Over.

The term "Introduction" in the title is not consistent with reader expectations. I'd recommend the Poundstone book for anyone wanting to learn more about the subject.

All in all, the book is only OK. It is a little long for a very short introduction at 175 pages. I found his descriptions somewhat confusing. He would sometimes bring up a concept, talk about it and then define it. Why not define it immediately? Sometimes the diagrams were not carefully explained and I had to do some detective work to understand what they meant.

I didn't really know anything about game theory before I read this book. I now feel I know a bit more than when I started. He did cover a lot of ground.

In order to get a better grasp of game theory, I will have to find some other books on the subject to supplement this book.

He is politically liberal and occaisionally makes a political comment but overall the book is not political.

This short introduction lacks an introduction. Important ideas such as the Nash Equilibrium are not clearly defined. Assumptions are not explicitly stated (e.g. do players make decisions based on the knowledge that the game will be played once, or that it will/may perhaps be repeated a number of times?; What are the player's objective functions? Are they the same for all players? What is the game theorist's objective function?).

In short, the author wrote this book assuming that the reader had already read an introduction to the subject.

It could be a great little book if it were planned a little more carefuly. I would buy the 2nd edition if were improved as an 'introduction'.

P.S. Ken - give us some details of that famous 3G auction which you single-handedly designed. Sounds impressive.

Not particularly good as an introduction. Defintions are skimped, steps are missed, results whose significance is not immediately obvious are simply stated. That said, if you have done some Game Theory and a few related topics this will be a useful review and roadmap.

I wanted to like this book, but after getting about halfway through it I decided to stop reading and return it because I found the author's explanations difficult to embrace.

My issue is that for a supposed "introductory book" to a difficult subject, I feel that the author writes to an audience that already has an understanding of the subject matter. Because of this, his explanations seem more technical than they should be.

On the plus side, the book is written in a friendly tone and it doesn't delve into the mathematics of game theory. There are "payoff" tables and logic trees, but these are akin to a logical reasoning question on the SATs, GREs, or LSATs.

For now, I'll have to continue to search for a book that is better suited to what I'm looking for.

It was an all right book but got somewhat technical and isn't for the casual reader. This is a book for someone needing some reference and a brief introduction to Game Theory who is possibly a math major or someone who is interested in Game Theory. Not for someone that thinks the title is cool and somehow related to other areas in life such as self help or the secret to life. This is mathematics!

I got lost with all the terminology and had to make notes and make an effort to learn the book. Other books of this series definitely come more naturally to the reader than this one.

All in all, there's probably better, more comprehensible works for the introduction to Game Theory

The reviewers for this book are forming into two different camps, those who find it a good introduction and those who feel that it does not do a good job introducing the subject matter at all. I fall in the latter group. The book does a poor job of describing the basic principles needed to understand the rest of the material. The author tries to avoid technical jargon and algebra, but to no avail to this reader. I will try and find another book on Game Theory that may do a better job. Perhaps it could supplement this book, but that is not the point of A Very Short Introduction, is it?