Behavioral Game Theory: Experiments in Strategic Interaction (The Roundtable Series in Behavioral Economics) (Hardcover)

by Colin F. Camerer (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"Colin Camerer's Behavioral Game Theory is a major achievement. Nothing like it is available thus far, and the author is uniquely qualified to have written it. He has an impressive understanding of both psychology and economics. He has taken the trouble to 'talk through' hundreds of tricky arguments that elsewhere just get stated mathematically. Rarer still is his positive attitude toward modeling, experimentation, econometrics, and other methodologies. If his book invests others with the same open-minded, synergistic outlook, that alone would make it worthwhile."

Review
Colin Camerer's Behavioral Game Theory fills an important niche in the literature. It brings together and synthesizes a large body of experimental and theoretical work on multi-person interactions, in psychology as well as economics. The result is a theory of games enriched by empirical knowledge and significantly closer to what is needed for applications. Camerer's book will make an outstanding principal or supplementary text for graduate or advanced undergraduate courses in game theory and experimental economics.
(Vincent Crawford, University of California, San Diego )

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 544 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (February 25, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691090394
• ISBN-13: 978-0691090399
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #183,348 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars outstanding textbook for behavioral economics, July 14, 2008

By	Stephen Weinberg (Albany, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is an extremely well organized presentation of key theories and evidence in behavioral game theory, a subset of topics from the field of behavioral economics. I have often assigned chapters 1 and 2 in behavioral economics classes at Harvard and Duke, and recommended other chapters to students who want to learn about Learning theory. (I would cheerfully assign the other chapters if I happened to be covering those topics, but there's only so much you can squeeze into a 1-semester undergraduate course!)

The book has many strengths. First, Camerer is one of the Very Important Scholars in behavioral economics, and there are less than a handful of people (Matt Rabin) who could conceivably be argued to be more authoritative on the subject matter. Second, Camerer makes extraordinarily good use of summary tables, explicit sections/subsections/subsubsections, summary paragraphs, and the like to help the reader keep track of the details, and to quickly locate the particular details of interest. Third, the introductory chapter offers a wonderful and intuitive introduction to the field; I have often started the first class of a new semester by reproducing the experiments in the chapter as classroom demonstrations. Fourth, the appendices to the introduction offer a good overview of economics experiments and of game theory (no substitute for a full textbook on game theory, of course, but a good refresher, and enough to get the bare bones of the subject). I expect the reader will quickly find many other reasons to admire this book.

This is NOT a book for a casual read by a non-economist. It's a textbook, or a handbook for economists and other people with a reasonable mathematical background who want to see, in one place, the most important results in behavioral game theory (as of a few years ago). It's also designed to present scholarly research, which means the reader should be prepared for the scholar's willingness to leave a lot of loose ends lying around and NOT to claim to know the definitive answers to the questions.

If you are a lay person looking for a behavioral economics book for the general audience, you should probably look to Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's Nudge or Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational. All three of those authors are first-tier scholars and major contributors to the literature in their own right, and those books are written with a non-specialist audience in mind.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Game Theory For All, January 20, 2008

By	Jack Marrion - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The required math knowledge to truly understand game theory is rather intense, and this book will allow one to put their knowledge to the test. However, the book also enables readers with limited math skills to appreciate and conceptually understand what behavioral game theory is, how it works, and the implications it has on future research in the strategic/behavioral theory camps.