Problem Detail: I am a starting Ph.D. student in computer science, and I am trying to understand some classic game-theory papers, such as those by Nash, Kalai and Smorodinsky. But I find it hard to understand the mathematical parts. It seems that these papers were written by mathematicians, for mathematicians. Can you recommend a book that explains the mathematical preliminaries of game theory, to people without extensive mathematical background?
Asked By : Erel Segal-Halevi
Answered By : Subhayan
[The reviews are based on my first hand experience with the materials.] Quick Read:
- Essentials of game theory (Leyton-Brown, Shoham) – This is a ~100 page book, which will give a strong intuition (and more) on Game theory, this mostly covers the basics, the math here is also pretty lightweight, and this is very much readable (even by a college junior). After this book the reader should be able to (atleast) sit through an advance GT Talk.
- An Algorithmic Game Theory Primer (Tim Roughgarden) – A really nice survey by Tim Roughgarden. It talks about various disciplines like Mechanism Design, Complexity of Equilibria, among many other things.This should motivate the reader to identify the other areas of research.
Books:
- Algorithmic Game Theory (Nisan et al) – This is perhaps the most popular book among Computational Game Theorists.. It covers a lot of ground, and the content is very rich. (IMHO) This is one of the books, that every researcher should read before diving into the subject.
- Lectures in Game Theory for Computer Scientists (eds. Apt and Grädel) This is yet another book that contains essays from several authors and is rich in application content. As the name suggests, this is for a great resource for computer scientists who want to use game theory for their research.
Also, if you are done with these, want more advanced material take a look at the LNCS Proceedings of SAGT.
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