Games of Strategy (Hardcover)

by Avinash K. Dixit (Author), Susan Skeath (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review
A marvelous book! Every topic is right on target, and the exposition is extraordinary. You can count me among the many people who will find it the best undergraduate text on the subject. -- Vincent Crawford, University of California-San Diego

Dixit and Skeath recognize the possibility of teaching the concepts of game theory at the earliest stages of the undergraduate curriculum; this is very progressive and praiseworthy. Using Games of Strategy, students everywhere--budding military strategists at Annapolis and economic theorists in training at Chicago alike--will be able to enjoy an early introduction to the field. The generous variety of illustrative specific cases has the effect that what is learned can be more easily retained than if there were only the assertion of theoretical concepts without enlightening examples. -- John F. Nash jr., Princeton University, Nobel Laureate, Economic Sciences

Games of Strategy provides a marvelous introduction to game theory. It is full of engaging examples drawn from economics, political science, and other areas. This book would serve very well as the core text for a nontechnical game theory course in political science departments. -- Robert Powell, University of California-Berkeley

I have long thought that an elementary game theory text was a great idea, and I have reviewed a number of book proposals and manuscripts by economists hoping to produce such a book. Games of Strategy is super, both in its initial objectives and in its execution of them. -- Amanda Bayer, Swarthmore College

Thanks very much for allowing me to use the draft version of Games of Strategy, by Avinash Dixit and Susan Skeath. It is a superb book, probably the best text that I have used in my twelve years as a college professor. My sense is that it quickly will become the most widely used nontechnical introduction to game theory. It is extremely well done. -- Larry Evans, College of William and Mary

To know game theory is to change your lifetime way of thinking. Games of Strategy is a delightful skeleton key to the twenty-first century's emerging culture. -- Paul A. Samuelson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Nobel Laureate, Economic Sciences

Product Description
All introductory textbooks begin by attempting to convince the student readers that the subject is of great importance in the world, and therefore merits their attention. The physical sciences and engineering claim to be the basis of modern technology and therefore of modern life; the social sciences discuss big issues of governance, for example, democracy and taxation; the humanities claim that they revive your soul after it has been deadened by exposure to the physical and social sciences and to engineering. Where does the subject "games of strategy," often also called game theory, fit into this picture, and why should you study it? Dixit and Skeath's Games of Strategy offers a practical motivation much more individual and closer to your personal concerns than most other subjects. You play games of strategy all the time: with your parents, siblings, friends, enemies, even with your professors. You have probably acquired a lot of instinctive expertise, and we hope you will recognize in what follows some of the lessons you have already learned. This book's authors will build on this experience, systematize it, and develop it to the point where you will be able to improve your strategic skills and use them more methodically. Opportunities for such uses will appear throughout the rest of your life; you will go on playing such games with your employers, employees, spouses, children, and even strangers. Not that the subject lacks wider importance. Similar games are played in business, politics, diplomacy, wars--in fact, whenever people interact to strike mutually agreeable deals or to resolve conflicts. Being able to recognize such games will enrich your understanding of the world around you, and will make you a better participant in all its affairs.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 600 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (June 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393974219
• ISBN-13: 978-0393974218
• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 7.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #695,343 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

54 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Why won't anyone just call it the Battle of the Sexes?, August 24, 2000

By	John M. Woodruff (Illinois, USA) - See all my reviews

I used this book for the second half of a principles of micro. course, to supplement the shoddy, one-chapter-on-the-Prisoners'-Dilemma treatment found in most principles textbooks. Everything said here should be interepreted according to this. From this instructor, the book gets points for being the best one available for teaching low-level undergraduates, but it could have been a LOT better. For example:

The notation and terminology are in many cases non-standard, and tend to change from chapter to chapter. The BoS is the Battle of Cultures (though this is not the first book to mess with this game). Chicken is a Game of Assurances, except in Ch. 10. SPE are (quasi-)formally described in Ch. 6, but they are actually introduced in Ch.4, where they are called Rollback Equilibria. Many times, I would have to tell students, "this is what your book calls a..."

The authors use confusing and convoluted examples to motivate concepts. For example, it takes a confusing, two-page story about advertizing in a political race to motivate study of sequential-move games. A simple entry-deterrence story gets the point across.

Also on this point, sequential-move games appear before simultaneous-move ones. I reversed this, in part ot be able to show that the set of SPE is merely a subset of the set of NE (again, using the entry-deterrence story). In fact, there's no real attempt to relate many of (seemingly unrelated) concepts to one another, as equilibrium refinements, each of which conforms to some intuitive concept of the "right" way of playing a given game.

The disucssion of the special case of two-person, zero-sum games, introducing pre-Nash notation and solution concepts is merely confusing for the uninitiated. I see no reason that anyone not yet in graduate school should have to know the min-max theorem.

In some ways, the books seems to suffer from over- and under-reach at the same time. The subject of infinitely repeated games gets two pages on TFT and Grim strategies in a repeated Prisoners' Dilema. There's no real discussion of rationalizability, or Bayesian games; many important concepts are smooshed into a couple of chapters, like they're being swept under the rug. There IS, however, a chapter on evolutionary games, and a (math-free) chapter on auctions.

Again, these are points that, I think, led to undue confusion, and required undue effort to counteract. However, I don't mean to be unduly harsh. I'm not suggesting that the authors should merely have mimeographed Fudenberg & Tirole, and whited-out the math. This is a useful book, ahead (as far as I know) of other treatments appropriate for students at this level. But it could have been much better.

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars From a student perspective, December 8, 2002

By A Customer

I used this book as a student in an undergraduate Game Theory course and have mixed feelings about it.

Positives: the book is written in a simple style with relatively good examples that promote conceptual understanding.

Negatives: the book is very poorly laid out. Some chapters don't seem to follow any logical progression, so the reader must frequently jump from one section to another. Additionally, the book doesn't utilize some fairly standard terms, and the index doesn't facilitate the book's use as a reference manual.

The reason I wrote this review was because I came online to try to find a better Game Theory textbook -- I ran into problem studying from this one.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent introduction to game theory, November 5, 2004

By	Amina Tarina - See all my reviews

This review is from: Games of Strategy, Second Edition (Hardcover)

This is a fantastic introduction to game theory. I'm in a graduate-level game theory course with a much more confusing textbook, and this one has enabled me to learn the concepts more clearly. Once I study the text and examples in Dixit & Skeath, I'm comfortable moving on to the harder problems in my other text. I definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in learning game theory -- you'll even get a few good laughs out of some of the examples and the authors' jokes.