Game Theory and its Applications: In the Social and Biological Sciences

by Andrew M. Colman

Andrew Coleman provides an accessible introduction to the fundamentals of mathematical gaming and other major applications in social psychology, decision theory, economics, politics, evolutionary biology, philosophy, operational research and sociology.

391 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 1998

Reviews

[Eduardo · Rating 3 out of 5]

While there were sections of this book that I skipped or skimmed, my reasons for doing so were driven by my interests rather than by the readability of the book. I am primarily interested in two-player, strictly competitive games so several of the middle and later chapters were less pertinent to me. Nonetheless, those chapters were interesting enough to garner at least some reading.

I enjoyed this book because of its more non-technical nature. Colman explains many aspects of game theory well, despite not relying on math to do so. When he did use math, the equations were very simple and supported his writing well. I liked that he highlighted and explained many common games that appear in the domain. I also appreciated that Colman included sections or chapters devoted to detailing empirical research in each area so that a reader could explore further into the scholarly work.

I did find his writing to be occasionally unnecessarily formulaic. Each chapter’s introduction included a description of what would follow in each section. While such descriptions can be useful in the flow of the book, it could also be argued that the same purpose is served by a detailed table of contents. Each chapter also concluded with a short summary section, detailing what had been explained in the chapter and these sections felt very superfluous.

There were also sections of the book in which Colman seemed to engage in somewhat pedantic refutations of other scholars’ work. I don’t know what purpose those sections served because they did not always help to explain away what could be perceived as weaker points in certain arguments. The sections seemed to be more tangential than essential.

Despite these areas in which I disagree with the writing style, the book is very informative and I will refer to it often as I continue to read about game theory.

[Brian Powell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only studied about a third of this book, skipping the sections on multi-person games and applications, as these weren't relevant to my project. This is a fairly non-technical introduction to the subject, and at that I think it does a good job. It's verbose in places, but appropriately so. It provides clear descriptions and lively discussions of a variety of strictly competitive and mixed-motive games, and introduces the basic tools of game theory, including game trees, payoff matrices, minimax, and Nash equilibria. It's a good jumping off point for those interested in more rigorous treatments of these topics, or more sophisticated types of games and the techniques for solving them.