Customer Reviews

Games Businesses Play: Cases and Models

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The author applies his breadth of practical and academic experience (ex-McKinsey consultant and Harvard Business School Professor) to create a range of practical case studies in applied game theory. There's a good balance here - the economists will like the theoretical rigor but it's still accessible to the general reader. Useful either as an introduction to game theory for managers, or a source of case examples for the more advanced student.

Pankaj Ghemawat applies the Harvard Business School concept of case studies to game theory. Ghemawat's intent is to demonstrate that game theory is applicable to business strategy. Overall Gemawat makes a strong case for the practical aplication of game theory to business strategies. The book is useful for teaching graduates and undegraduate students a practical use of game theory. The writing style is somewhat clunky but rereading each case 3 or 4 times is worth the effort. The calculus and statistics is somewhat complex for a non-specialist , however the basic ideas are presented clearly. Overall this is a challenging book that presents game theory in a more sophisticated manner than found in the customary introductory books that rely on the cook book recipe presentation.

Writing in a intuitive and straightforward way is not one of mr Ghemawats talents, at least judging from this book. His intention when writing this book seems to have been to encourage fellow academics to use the case study method to explore the usefulness of game theory and bring it closer to practitioners.

My backgound is that I have roughly 50 academic credits in economics (mostly financial) and I have read some introductory level game theory texts, and I was at a loss when looking at the game theoretic models that Ghemawat uses. I understood most of the analytics though and there is some pretty interesting material covered in this book. But I don't think the general reader of strategy literature will get that much out of it.

If you have a strong background in micro economic theory/game theory and like seeing it applied on business, you'll probably get a huge kick out of reading this book. Ghemawhat is very careful to report how the models are set up and adapted to the situation. Great stuff if you happen to like that sort of thing.

Before reading it, I had a huge over-belief in what game theory could accomplish, but after reading this book I have a much more realistic view of its limitations (in applied business strategy at least).