Game Theory: An Introduction, 2nd Edition

Preface for the Second Edition

This second edition expands the book in several ways. There is a new chapter on extensive games that takes advantage of the open-source software package GAMBIT1 to both draw the trees and solve the games. Even simple examples will show that doing this by hand is not really feasible and that’s why it was skipped in the first edition. These games are now included in this edition because it provides a significant expansion of the number of game models that the student can think about and implement. It is an important modeling experience and one cannot avoid thinking about the game and the details to get it right.

Many more exercises have been added to the end of most sections. Some material has been expanded upon and some new results have been discussed. For instance, the book now has a section on correlated equilibria and a new section on explicit solutions of three player cooperative games due to recent results of Leng and Parlar (2010). The use of software makes these topics tractable. Finding a correlated equilibrium depends on solving a linear programming problem that becomes a trivial task with Maple™/Mathematica® or any linear programming package.

Once again there is more material in the book than can be covered in one semester, especially if one now wants to include extensive games. Nevertheless, all of the important topics can be covered in one semester if one does not get sidetracked into linear programming or economics. The major topics forming ...