Readings in Game Theory

General

• Game Theory
  Don Ross, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , 1997 (revised 2006).
  Excellent survey and bibliography, with good,simple examples of both the basics and some more complicated ideas.
  Read Part One (Philosophical and Historical Motivation) and Part Two (Basic Elements and Assumptions of Game Theory).

• List of Game Theory Games
  from Wikipedia, which provides links to detailed discussion of the most often cited games. Wikipedia also has a convenient list of game theorists with links to articles about them.

  
  I organize these "classic games" of game theory by chapter of Dixit-Skeath below:
  

  Sequential games (Extensive form games) [Dixit-Skeath Chap. 3]

  • Extensive Form Game (Wikipedia)
    
  • Guess 2/3 of the average (Wikipedia)
    
  • Centipede game (Wikipedia)
    
  • Pirate game (Wikipedia)
    

  Simultaneous games (Normal form or strategic form games)[Dixit-Skeath Chap. 4]

  • Normal form game (Wikipedia)
    
  • Prisoner's Dilemma (Wikipedia)
    
  • Dominance (Wikipedia)
    
  • Battle of the Sexes (Wikipedia)
    
  • Chicken (Wikipedia)
    
  • Assurance game (Stag hunt) (Wikipedia)
    
    See Brian Skyrms, The Stag Hunt for an extended account (From Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association , Vol. 75,No.2 (Nov. 2001), pp. 31-41. Access from Pitt network only)

  Continuous Strategies [Dixit-Skeath Chap. 5]

  • Cournot game (Wikipedia)
    
  • Cournot Duopoly Example (Class example)
  • The Legacy of Augustin Cournot by James W. Friedman.
    An appreciation by a leading game theorist.
    Marred by a (presumably computer-generated) glitch: "fi", "fo" (and for all I know "fee" and "fum")are printed as "...".
  • Tutorial on the theory of the firm by Martin J. Osborne.
    The section on theories of oligopoly is a nice presentation by a famous game theorist of the Cournot model with undifferentiated products and firms choosing quantities.

  • Nash equilibrium
    • Nash equilibrium (Wikipedia)
      
    • The Nash Equilibrium: a persepective by Charles A. Holt and Alvin E. Roth. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2004:101, pp. 3999-4002
    • Nash Equilibrium and the History of Economic Theory
      by Roger B. Myerson
      This also appeared in Journal of Economic Literature, Vol.37,no.3 (Sep., 1999), pp. 1067-1082. (Access from Pitt network only).

  • Rationalizability (Wikipedia)
    

  Combining Sequential and Simultaneous Games [Dixit-Skeath Chap. 6]

  • Subgame perfection (Wikipedia)
  
  

  Mixed Continuous Strategies [Dixit-Skeath Chap. 7]

  
  Unfortunately, the mixed strategy entry in Wikipedia is not very helpful, and their article on the

  Minimax theorem uses the term in too general a sense to be useful in game theory.
  

  • John von Neumann's Conception of the Minimax Theorem by Tinne Hoff Kjedlsen, Arch.Hist.Exact.Sci., 56(2001): 39-68 is an interesting but technical article on von Neumann's discovery of minimax in 1928 and of his priority dispute with Emile Borel.(Access from Pitt network only)

  Uncertainty and Information [Dixit-Skeath Chap. 9]

  Strategic Moves [Dixit-Skeath Chap. 10]

  Repeated Games [Dixit-Skeath Chap. 11]

  For your paper, concentrate on the Huber and Olson reviews and Axelrod's articles on the computer tournament from the Journal of Conflict Resolution
  • Prisoner's Dilemma by Steven Kuhn. Very good survey of the extensions to the Prisoner's Dilemma.
  • Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma Research site at the University of Lille (France), with software implementations of the game.
  • Review of The Evolution of Cooperation
    A review of Robert Axelrod's book on the Prisoners Dilemma by Mancur Olson, American Journal of Sociology, 91:6 (May, 1986), pp. 1464-1466.
  • Competition, Conglomerates and the Evolution of Cooperation
    , by Peter Huber. Yale Law Journal, 93:6 (May,1984), pp. 1147-1172. Long review of Axelrod, with applications to competition policy.
  • The Emergence of Cooperation among Egoists
    Robert Axelrod, American Political Science Review, 75:2(June, 1981), pp. 306-318.
  • Robert Axelrod's computer tournament articles:
    • Effective Choice in the Prisoner's Dilemma
      Journal of Conflict Resolution , 24:1 (March, 1980): pp. 3-25.
    • More Effective Choice in the Prisoner's Dilemma
      Journal of Conflict Resolution, 24:3 (Sept., 1980): pp. 379-403.

  Collective Action Games [Dixit-Skeath Chap. 12]

  • Tragedy of the Commons Wikipedia article with extensive, useful links.
  • The Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin.
    Science, 162 (1968), pp. 1243-1248. The original article. See Tragedy of the Commons? A Special Issue of Science for more essays.
  • International Association for the Study of the Commons has an extensive bibliography of papers related to the commons problem. There were 1716 entries under "game theory."

  Evolutionary Games [Dixit-Skeath Chap. 13]

• Hawk-Dove (Wikipedia)