gintis's Game Theory Evolving

Posted by David Eric Smith on Aug 10, 2006; 5:53pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/gintis-s-Game-Theory-Evolving-tp522394p522401.html

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