Games and Decisions: Introduction and Critical Survey | 
| Authors: R. Duncan Luce, Howard Raiffa
Publisher: Dover Publications
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 237197
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 509
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.4 x 1.1
ISBN: 0486659437
Dewey Decimal Number: 519.3
EAN: 9780486659435
ASIN: 0486659437
Publication Date: April 1, 1989
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Condition: Stained Edges;stained cover Giving great service since 2004: Buy from the Best! 4,000,000 items shipped to delighted customers. We have 1,000,000 unique items ready to ship! Find your Great Buy today!
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Product Description
Superb nontechnical introduction to game theory and related disciplines, primarily as applied to the social sciences. Clear, comprehensive coverage of utility theory, 2-person zero-sum games, 2-person non-zero-sum games, n-person games, individual and group decision-making, much more. Appendixes. Bibliography. Graphs and figures.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
 The importance of the game theory February 29, 2008
The book talk in interesting way about the role of the game theory in the actual economy. The arguments are formally very good. The student can make easy the proofs and the applications are clear. I am interesting particullary about cooperative games and I'm sorry that it here lack the relation with the projective geometry.
 Overwhelming for your average liberal arts major November 7, 2007
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
You need calculus to appreciate this one.
But it is still very good. Like a dinner made by a top chef with the finest possible materials, it still may not be to your personal taste, no matter how well made it is. "Games and Decisions" is of limited utility for non-mathematicians, especially the attorneys and liberal arts majors that make decisions for nations.
The maths are mostly over my head, and I was only really able to follow one out of four pages (on the average) of the book. Nevertheless, from what I could appreciate, I learned a lot about the nature of utility, reiterative games, non-zero sum games, conditions of certainty and uncertainty, etc, as well as a lot of 'special case' games in the appendices.
I can see that this is the work of masters, but it is not something I can fully appreciate.
E. M. Van Court
 The appendices are the best part July 3, 2006
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I had this book for a number of years before I could appreciate its use. The reading in the main text can be very low yield at times, as he is often simply musing, explaining the implications of certain ideas without much mathematical analysis. This is basically a very long primer on game theory, which ends up often explaining what is intuitively obvious based on his previous expositions.
So why 5 stars? For starters the book is quite comprehensive, but where I found this book really shines is the appendices, which comprise roughly a fourth of the book and are really interesting. They address topics in high yield fashion simply getting to the mathematical methods: A probabilistic theory of utility, The minimax theorem, Geometrical Interpretation of Games, Linear Programming and Games, Methods for solving Games, Recursive Games, and Games of Survival.
A mathematician may not find anything in this book that is new to him other than an explanation of what game theory is and a vocabulary for reading and writing about game theory, but a non-mathematician (like me) will likely find some very interesting topics presented in the appendices.
This was the textbook used by John Nash...... February 12, 2002
34 out of 37 found this review helpful
in his course in Game Theory (M711!) at MIT in the late 1950's.
I took that course; while Nash was unquestionably brilliant, he was getting to be pretty hard to follow at that point. The lecture hall was always jammed to overflowing, because even on a bad day Nash was really something! Nevertheless, the book was subsequently very useful, with lots of ideas about game-theoretic approaches to real-world problems.Nash didn't think too highly of this book (too much non-mathematical stuff), but thought it the best available at the time not written by his arch-enemy, Von Neumann!
A Great Read March 24, 2000
29 out of 31 found this review helpful
This overview of game theory and decisions is a great into the problems and ideas behind game theory. I expect that this book will be most appreciated by non-math Ph.D.'s or grad students. For a math person, Von Neumann and Morgenstern's classic title is perhaps a better place to start. This book is one of those that can be read on a range of levels. I work in a trading and risk management environment and I find this book very useful.
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