52 books like Game Theory

This book is a beautiful, non-mathematical introduction to Game Theory for everyone, even high school students interested in strategy, its basic modeling, and how to solve games.

It has applications to everyday life, including examples from real business and political science, making it accessible to all sorts of readers. Its verbal description of some solution concepts and mathematical results is, however, too lengthy at times, especially for non-English speakers and students with a good math background, potentially leading to unnecessary confusion.

This is still regarded as the Microeconomics “bible” among PhD students at top programs.

Most students often say they “had to suffer” this book (typically known as MWG) after being able to fully understand its details years later (hopefully before completing their PhD degrees!). While relatively technical in some chapters, it is extremely useful to get used to writing style of journal articles.

Detailed exposition of general equilibrium theory.

This book is highly recommended for students in graduate programs with a strong game theory and mechanism design focus.

As MWG, it is especially technical in some chapters, but its writing is more “modern” in Introductions and other sections, helping the reader “see the forest” a bit more easily than with other books. The math appendix is also excellent and exercises are a good challenge for strong students.

The first volume examines consumer and producer theory, choice under uncertainty, and general equilibrium; while the second analyzes game theory, contract theory, and mechanism design.

These are, perhaps, the most rigorous, detailed, and advanced books of the typical topics covered in PhD Microeconomics in top institutions nowadays. While excellent for instructors, or advanced PhD students, the two volumes may be rather difficult to cover in the first-year PhD Microeconomics sequence, given their length and technicalities.

Nonetheless, both volumes will be quite helpful for instructors teaching graduate Microeconomics everywhere!

A short presentation of consumer and producer theory (no game theory or contract theory), very rigorous, and with some interesting examples.

Challenging exam exercises at the end of the book. Last but not least, the eBook is available for free from Prof. Ariel Rubinstein’s website.

While most students may find it too succinct to be the only reference in PhD Microeconomics courses, it is probably one of the references several students use (seeking different explanations and examples) at top PhD programs.

This book is a short introduction to undergraduate-level Game Theory, with a special focus on basic games of complete information and contracts.

It avoids jargon, notation, or formal definitions but emphasizes economic intuition and offers many examples in each chapter. Some chapters require a good math background, making the book a good fit for students who already took at least one course in algebra and calculus.

This is an excellent, non-technical introduction to game theory, covering most topics, including incomplete information games and evolutionary game theory.

Packed with real-life examples, along with humorous and historical notes, the book is appropriate for undergraduate students from different majors, including political science, history, psychology, and biology.

The book focuses on presenting topics at the undergraduate level, avoiding difficult notation and jargon, and minimizing the math, thus not being a good fit for technical courses in game theory at the Master's and Ph.D. levels, but again, it’s one of the best introductions to game theory for non-technical readers currently available.

This book is an extremely rigorous and formal presentation of Game Theory concepts to Ph.D. students.

The chapters about complete information games and repeated games are particularly superb relative to other advanced books in this field. It also offers chapters on cooperative games, which is quite uncommon in other books (both at the undergraduate and graduate levels.)

The coverage of signaling games, Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium, and equilibrium refinements is relatively brief compared to most other topics in the book, but the book is still great.

This is a classic reference for students learning microeconomic theory, both in economics and business degrees.

It offers a nice combination of motivating real-life examples, rigor, figures, and intuitive explanations.

Because it avoids mathematical details in most chapters, it is often used in introductory courses, helping get students “hungry for more” in next courses, such as intermediate or advanced microeconomics.

However, it assumes a bit more mathematical background than Krugman and Wells’ book (presented above), so it can be used as the main reference for introductory courses if students have some basic algebra.

The antitrust rules introduced in the late 1970s and 1980s are largely still in place. 

In important ways, those rules were shaped by the economic analyses and arguments of well-known scholars associated with the University of Chicago.

Since then, microeconomics has been transformed using concepts from game theory, and economic thinking about the competitive consequences of firm practices has changed.  This economic-based guide to business strategy distills key concepts that underlie modern antitrust analysis, which is a close cousin to business strategy.

The book lays out those concepts clearly and accessibly, with instructive case studies and minimal jargon. These ideas from economic theory, combined with new empirical tools and data, are the basis for the recent economic research that finds that today’s antitrust rules are inadequate to prevent the acquisition and exercise of market power.