Strategies and Games: Theory and Practice

Game theory has become increasingly popular among undergraduate as well as business school students. This text is the first to provide both a complete theoretical treatment of the subject and a variety of real-world applications, primarily in economics, but also in business, political science, and the law. Strategies and Games grew out of Prajit Dutta's experience teaching a course in game theory over the last six years at Columbia University. The book is divided into three parts: Strategic Form Games and Their Applications, Extensive Form Games and Their Applications, and Asymmetric Information Games and Their Applications. The theoretical topics include dominance solutions, Nash equilibrium, backward induction, subgame perfect equilibrium, repeated games, dynamic games, Bayes-Nash equilibrium, mechanism design, auction theory, and signaling. An appendix presents a thorough discussion of single-agent decision theory, as well as the optimization and probability theory required for the course. Every chapter that introduces a new theoretical concept opens with examples and ends with a case study. Case studies include Global Warming and the Internet, Poison Pills, Treasury Bill Auctions, and Final Jeopardy. Each part of the book also contains several chapter-length applications including Bankruptcy Law, the NASDAQ market, OPEC, and the Commons problem. This is also the first text to provide a detailed analysis of dynamic strategic interaction.