Nick, hi, I think a lot of people agree with your take on a very heavy emphasis on a somewhat narrow view of game theory.
Though it is not without its difficulties, a book I have found valuable is Martin Shubik's "Game Theory in the Social Sciences". This is written more from the perspective of a RAND cold-war game theorist, and has an entirely different feel. Rather than try to convince you that a 2x2 payoff matrix yields compelling wisdom about emotionally charged social problems, the Shubik book is more in the spirit of von Neumann and Morgenstern. This crowd views game theory as the proper framework to make explicit ones assumptions about what an agent knows and what he is allowed to do. As a result, there is a lot more emphasis on cooperative versus non-cooperative gaming as a procedural distinction, and on the relations between extensive-form, strategic-form, and coalitional-form specifications of games (the 2x2 payoff matrices are a tiny subset of games in strategic form). Shubik's book tends to emphasize how one can get any answer as a solution -- sometimes more than I have a taste for -- where I would prefer more emphasis on validation, but it is a better survey of the richness of game theory as a tool for talking carefully about agency and strategic dynamics than some of the more visible recent books. One also sees a wider variety of applications, including voter problems and the valuation of the bargaining "power" of an individual in a setting where coalitions are invested with actual strategic choices. Shubik's big interest, of course, is the conceptualization and modeling of money, and that is heavily emphasized, but a nice side-effect is the treatment of "special" players like governments. Of course, because of its era and the author's interests, it does leave out developments that are important in thinking about games. One is the "behavioral economics" angle as an input to parametrize valuations. The other is the commitment to evolutionary models of error and updating, which could be viewed as either the combination of game theory with history-dependent monte-carlo, or the recursive specification of game dynamics where the original strategic form required that everything be laid out explicitly in advance. Hope this is useful to balance out the discussion of what game theorists think game theory is. Eric ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
