Here are 100 books that Strategy fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am a Professor of Economics at Washington State University. My research focuses on applying Game Theory and Industrial Organization models to polluting industries and other regulated markets. I analyze how firms strategically respond to environmental regulation, including their output and pricing decisions, their investments in clean technologies, and merger decisions, both under complete and incomplete information contexts.
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.
Game theory means rigorous strategic thinking. It's the art of anticipating your opponent's next moves, knowing full well that your rival is trying to do the same thing to you. Though parts of game theory involve simple common sense, much is counterintuitive, and it can only be mastered by developing a new way of seeing the world. Using a diverse array of rich case studies-from pop culture, TV, movies, sports, politics, and history-the authors show how nearly every business and personal interaction has a game-theory component to it. Mastering game theory will make you more successful in business and life,…
I am a Professor of Economics at Washington State University. My research focuses on applying Game Theory and Industrial Organization models to polluting industries and other regulated markets. I analyze how firms strategically respond to environmental regulation, including their output and pricing decisions, their investments in clean technologies, and merger decisions, both under complete and incomplete information contexts.
An excellent game theory book for graduate students, especially for Master's students taking second-year elective courses on game theory, and even technical enough for the first-year Ph.D. Microeconomics course (since most schools spend most of the second semester covering game theory, contract theory, and applications.)
Rigorous, with detailed definitions and notation, yet accessible to senior undergraduate students at top schools (with a strong math background) or Master's students.
This comprehensive textbook introduces readers to the principal ideas and applications of game theory, in a style that combines rigor with accessibility. Steven Tadelis begins with a concise description of rational decision making, and goes on to discuss strategic and extensive form games with complete information, Bayesian games, and extensive form games with imperfect information. He covers a host of topics, including multistage and repeated games, bargaining theory, auctions, rent-seeking games, mechanism design, signaling games, reputation building, and information transmission games. Unlike other books on game theory, this one begins with the idea of rationality and explores its implications for…
I am a Professor of Economics at Washington State University. My research focuses on applying Game Theory and Industrial Organization models to polluting industries and other regulated markets. I analyze how firms strategically respond to environmental regulation, including their output and pricing decisions, their investments in clean technologies, and merger decisions, both under complete and incomplete information contexts.
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.
Written for majors courses in economics, business, political science, and international relations, but accessible to students across the undergraduate spectrum, Joseph Harrington's innovative textbook makes the tools and applications of game theory and strategic reasoning both fascinating and easy to understand. Each chapter focuses a specific strategic situation as a way of introducing core concepts informally at first, then more fully, with a minimum of mathematics. At the heart of the book is a diverse collection of strategic scenarios, not only from business and politics, but from history, fiction, sports, and everyday life as well. With this approach, students don't…
I am a Professor of Economics at Washington State University. My research focuses on applying Game Theory and Industrial Organization models to polluting industries and other regulated markets. I analyze how firms strategically respond to environmental regulation, including their output and pricing decisions, their investments in clean technologies, and merger decisions, both under complete and incomplete information contexts.
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.
Now in its second edition, this popular textbook on game theory is unrivalled in the breadth of its coverage, the thoroughness of technical explanations and the number of worked examples included. Covering non-cooperative and cooperative games, this introduction to game theory includes advanced chapters on auctions, games with incomplete information, games with vector payoffs, stable matchings and the bargaining set. This edition contains new material on stochastic games, rationalizability, and the continuity of the set of equilibrium points with respect to the data of the game. The material is presented clearly and every concept is illustrated with concrete examples from…
I grew up listening and participating in discussions about politics. These discussions often ended up on Economics – after all, “it’s the economy, stupid!”. Game theory, by being very broad and focused on strategic interactions, served as a very rewarding unifying apparatus for my understanding of Economics. It is also very beautiful and elegant, combining the austere beauty of pure mathematics with insights from elegant literature – I was pleased to cite Graham Green’s Our Man in Havana in a recent paper. It has accompanied me in a 20-year career since my PhD in Economics at the University of Minnesota to my current professorship in Economics at the University of Surrey.
When the goal is to have an appealing introduction to game theory, with plenty of economic applications, there can hardly be any book better than this one.
It covers the core elements of game theory in a simple, yet careful, way, always illustrating them with expertly chosen economic problems. A must for anyone wanting to enter the world of game theory.
This book's introduces one of the most powerful tools of modern economics to a wide audience - not only those who will specialize as pure game theorists but also those who will construct (or even just consume) game-theoretic models in applied fields of economics.
As a Professor of Economic History at the Oxford University, I taught the history of economic thought and wrote articles and a book in the field (The Nobel Factor).I love the limpid style and encompassing view of the classical economists (the first century after Smith). Their literary and academic styles have been abandoned, but they still have a great deal to teach. The role of land and natural resources as a factor of production in their theory has become relevant again as the environment comes under pressure. I also published in several other fields. My latest book is Understanding the Private-Public Divide: Markets, Governments and Time Horizons (2022).
Read anything by Mirowski. By far the best writer in the field today.
Highly original, massively intelligent, stimulating, witty, deeply informed, a trenchant writer. His life’s work is to probe the validity and scientific pretensions of the discipline.
The critiques are biting, all the more so for the real-world authority wielded by economists. That he is sometimes a provocative maverick adds to the appeal.
Machine Dreamsargued implausibly (for its time) that economics had embraced robotic simulation. The emergence of AI shows how far ahead of its time it was.
This was the first cross-over book into the history of science written by an historian of economics. It shows how 'history of technology' can be integrated with the history of economic ideas. The analysis combines Cold War history with the history of postwar economics in America and later elsewhere, revealing that the Pax Americana had much to do with abstruse and formal doctrines such as linear programming and game theory. It links the literature on 'cyborg' to economics, an element missing in literature to date. The treatment further calls into question the idea that economics has been immune to postmodern…
I taught for 45 years at Ithaca College broken by two years as Fulbright Professor in West Africa at the University of Liberia. During my years in academia, I developed several new courses including a popular “Math in Africa” class and the first U.S. course for college credit in chess theory. I’ve always had a passion for and continue to have strong interests in (1) national educational and social issues concerning equal access to math education for all and (2) teaching others about the power of mathematics and statistics to help one more deeply understand social issues.
Steven Levitt, Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, has written a thoughtful book at the layperson level to help one understand how mathematical and economic tools provide insights into sensitive social issues from racism to abortion.
He delves into predicting the long-term consequences of short-term decisions. This book is not intended for the college classroom, and it is controversial, but I found it to be a fascinating read.
The legendary bestseller that made millions look at the world in a radically different way returns in a new edition, now including an exclusive discussion between the authors and bestselling professor of psychology Angela Duckworth.
Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? Which should be feared more: snakes or french fries? Why do sumo wrestlers cheat? In this groundbreaking book, leading economist Steven Levitt—Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and winner of the American Economic Association’s John Bates Clark medal for the economist under 40 who has made the greatest contribution to the discipline—reveals that…
We are law professors at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Eyal Zamir is interested in the intersections of law, economics, ethics, and psychology. In addition to theoretical studies of these issues, he engages in experimental legal studies, as well. Barak Medina studies constitutional law, human rights, and economic analysis of law. He is interested in constitutional interpretation and the interaction between common-sense morality, public opinion and adjudication.
One of the world’s leading microeconomic scholars presents in this fascinating book brilliant insights about economic theory and its role in public policy.
Rubinstein challenges several central tenets of game theory, and sheds light on the role economics can and should play in society at large. The book presents economic theory through a series of fables.
The stories provide the basic insights of economics, but also enables us to critically evaluate the effect of implicit assumptions on the predictive power of economic theory and its moral implications.
"I had the good fortune to grow up in a wonderful area of Jerusalem, surrounded by a diverse range of people: Rabbi Meizel, the communist Sala Marcel, my widowed Aunt Hannah, and the intellectual Yaacovson. As far as I'm concerned, the opinion of such people is just as authoritative for making social and economic decisions as the opinion of an expert using a model." Part memoir, part crash-course in economic theory, this deeply engaging book by one of the world's foremost economists looks at economic ideas through a personal lens. Together with an introduction to some of the central concepts…
When understanding the interactions in our economy, it is critical to recognize all participants in this complex system. I’m passionate about microeconomics because it provides me with a different perspective to examine the world around me. I use my microeconomic glasses and I enjoy rationalizing the daily interactions and predicting the potential outcomes.
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.
Microeconomics and its role in decision making and public policy
Microeconomics exposes readers to topics that play a central role in microeconomics. From game theory and competitive strategy, to the roles of uncertainty and information, and the analysis of pricing by firms with market power, the text helps you understand what's going on in the world of business. It also shows you how microeconomics can be used as a practical tool for decision-making and for designing and understanding public policy. The 9th Edition further illustrates microeconomics' relevance and usefulness with new…
Avinash Dixit is an emeritus university professor of economics at Princeton. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and was President of the American Economic Association for the year 2008.
This is the book that brought game theory to life. Eschewing dry mathematical theorems, and conducting rigorous logical analysis through rich examples of strategic use of threats, promises, and brinkmanship in real life, Schelling opened up a whole world of practical applications of the theory. My own thinking and writing about game theory owes a huge debt to Schelling. You should also read his “Arms and Influence,” “Micromotives and Macrobehavior,” and “Choice and Consequence.”
A series of closely interrelated essays on game theory, this book deals with an area in which progress has been least satisfactory-the situations where there is a common interest as well as conflict between adversaries: negotiations, war and threats of war, criminal deterrence, extortion, tacit bargaining. It proposes enlightening similarities between, for instance, maneuvering in limited war and in a traffic jam; deterring the Russians and one's own children; the modern strategy of terror and the ancient institution of hostages.
