Games, Strategies, and Decision Making

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 just learn clever answers to puzzles, but instead acquire genuine insights into human behavior.

Table of Contents

PART 1 Constructing a Game Using the Extensive and Strategic Forms

CHAPTER 1 Introduction to Strategic Reasoning

CHAPTER 2 Building a Model of a Strategic Situation

PART 2 Rational Behavior

CHAPTER 3 Eliminating the Impossible: Solving a Game when Rationality Is Common Knowledge

CHAPTER 4 Stable Play: Nash Equilibria in Discrete Games with Two or Three Players

CHAPTER 5 Stable Play: Nash Equilibria in Discrete n-Player Games

CHAPTER 6 Stable Play: Nash Equilibria in Continuous Games

CHAPTER 7 Keep ‘Em Guessing: Randomized Strategies

PART 3 Extensive Form Games

CHAPTER 8 Taking Turns: Sequential Games with Perfect Information

CHAPTER 9 Taking Turns in the Dark: Sequential Games with Imperfect Information

PART 4 Games of Incomplete Information

CHAPTER 10 I Know Something You Don’t Know: Games with Private Information

CHAPTER 11 What You Do Tells Me Who You Are: Signaling Games

CHAPTER 12 Lies and the Lying Liars That Tell Them: Cheap-Talk Games

PART 5 Repeated Games

CHAPTER 13 Playing Forever: Repeated Interaction with Infinitely Lived Players

CHAPTER 14 Cooperation and Reputation: Applications of Repeated Interaction with Infinitely Lived Players

CHAPTER 15 Interaction in Infinitely Lived Institutions

PART 6 Evolutionary Game Theory

CHAPTER 16 Evolutionary Game Theory and Biology: Evolutionarily Stable Strategies

CHAPTER 17 Evolutionary Game Theory and Biology: Replicator Dynamics

Answers to Check Your Understanding

About the Author

Joseph E. Harrington, Jr. is Professor of Economics at Johns Hopkins University. He has served on numerous editorial boards, including the RAND Journal of Economics, Foundations and Trends in Microeconomics, and the Southern Economic Journal. His research has appeared in top journals in a variety of disciplines including economics (e.g., the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, and Games and Economic Behavior), political science (Economics and Politics, Public Choice), sociology (American Journal of Sociology), organizational behavior (Management Science), and psychology (Journal of Mathematical Psychology). He is a co-author of the leading textbook Economics of Regulation and Antitrust, which is currently in its fourth edition.