Strategies and Games - Prajit Dutta

I wanted to know some game theory, and this seemed like a fluffy introduction (the bargain price at Heffer's was nothing to do with it). Reading it confirmed this view - the whole book seems to be written for economists who find calculus terribly difficult. On the other hand, it's filled with simple, understandable worked examples with numbers.

The perceived lack of rigour isn't actually much of a problem, as I was only really interested in an intuitive overview, and the book still works through a good number of areas. The general complexity of examples is quite shallow, with most situations simplified to their bare bones, but I'm not sure this is something that would really be changed in a deeper book, since the examples are really trying to explain principles, rather than demonstrate complex modelling. Bearing in mind these limitations, it's really quite readable, but I'd need to read other books on the topic to get a decent comparison.

Posted 2005-03-30.