Playing for Real, Coursepack Edition A Text on Game Theory

Playing for Real is a problem-based textbook on game theory that has been widely used at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The Coursepack Edition will be particularly useful for teachers new to the subject. It contains only the material necessary for a course of ten, two-hourlectures plus problem classes and comes with a disk of teaching aids including pdf files of the author's own lecture presentations together with two series of weekly exercise sets with answers and two sample final exams with answers. There are at least three questions a game theory book might answer: What is game theory about? How is game theory applied? Why is game theory right? Playing for Real is perhaps the only book that attempts to answer all three questions without getting heavily mathematical. Its many problems andexamples are an integral part of its approach. Just as athletes take pleasure in training their bodies, there is much satisfaction to be found in training one's mind to think in a way that is simultaneously rational and creative. With all of its puzzles and paradoxes, game theory provides amagnificent mental gymnasium for this purpose. It is the author's hope that exercising on the equipment provided by this coursepack edition of Playing for Real will bring the reader the same kind of pleasure that it has brought to so many other students.

Ken Binmore is a mathematician-turned-economist who has devoted his life to the theory of games and its applications in economics, evolutionary biology, psychology, and moral philosophy. He is well known for his part in designing the telecom auction that raised $35 billion for the British taxpayer, but his major research contributions are to the theory of bargaining and its testing in the laboratory. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of 12 books and some 90 research papers. He is Emeritus Professor of Economics at University College London.