Here are 100 books that Games, Strategies, and Decision Making fans have personally recommended if you like
Games, Strategies, and Decision Making.
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I am a Professor of Economics at Washington State University. My research focuses on applying Game Theory and Industrial Organization models to polluting industries and other regulated markets. I analyze how firms strategically respond to environmental regulation, including their output and pricing decisions, their investments in clean technologies, and merger decisions, both under complete and incomplete information contexts.
This book is a beautiful, non-mathematical introduction to Game Theory for everyone, even high school students interested in strategy, its basic modeling, and how to solve games.
It has applications to everyday life, including examples from real business and political science, making it accessible to all sorts of readers. Its verbal description of some solution concepts and mathematical results is, however, too lengthy at times, especially for non-English speakers and students with a good math background, potentially leading to unnecessary confusion.
Game theory means rigorous strategic thinking. It's the art of anticipating your opponent's next moves, knowing full well that your rival is trying to do the same thing to you. Though parts of game theory involve simple common sense, much is counterintuitive, and it can only be mastered by developing a new way of seeing the world. Using a diverse array of rich case studies-from pop culture, TV, movies, sports, politics, and history-the authors show how nearly every business and personal interaction has a game-theory component to it. Mastering game theory will make you more successful in business and life,…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I am a Professor of Economics at Washington State University. My research focuses on applying Game Theory and Industrial Organization models to polluting industries and other regulated markets. I analyze how firms strategically respond to environmental regulation, including their output and pricing decisions, their investments in clean technologies, and merger decisions, both under complete and incomplete information contexts.
An excellent game theory book for graduate students, especially for Master's students taking second-year elective courses on game theory, and even technical enough for the first-year Ph.D. Microeconomics course (since most schools spend most of the second semester covering game theory, contract theory, and applications.)
Rigorous, with detailed definitions and notation, yet accessible to senior undergraduate students at top schools (with a strong math background) or Master's students.
This comprehensive textbook introduces readers to the principal ideas and applications of game theory, in a style that combines rigor with accessibility. Steven Tadelis begins with a concise description of rational decision making, and goes on to discuss strategic and extensive form games with complete information, Bayesian games, and extensive form games with imperfect information. He covers a host of topics, including multistage and repeated games, bargaining theory, auctions, rent-seeking games, mechanism design, signaling games, reputation building, and information transmission games. Unlike other books on game theory, this one begins with the idea of rationality and explores its implications for…
I am a Professor of Economics at Washington State University. My research focuses on applying Game Theory and Industrial Organization models to polluting industries and other regulated markets. I analyze how firms strategically respond to environmental regulation, including their output and pricing decisions, their investments in clean technologies, and merger decisions, both under complete and incomplete information contexts.
This book is a short introduction to undergraduate-level Game Theory, with a special focus on basic games of complete information and contracts.
It avoids jargon, notation, or formal definitions but emphasizes economic intuition and offers many examples in each chapter. Some chapters require a good math background, making the book a good fit for students who already took at least one course in algebra and calculus.
Joel Watson has refined his successful text to make it even more student-friendly. A number of sections have been added, and numerous chapters have been substantially revised. Dozens of new exercises have been added, along with solutions to selected exercises. Chapters are short and focused, with just the right amount of mathematical content and end-of-chapter exercises. New passages walk students through tricky topics.
Coyote weather is the feral, hungry season, drought-stricken, and ready to catch fire. It’s 1967, and the American culture is violently remaking itself while the country is forcibly sending its young men to fight in a deeply unpopular war.
Jerry has stubbornly made no plans for the future because he…
I am a Professor of Economics at Washington State University. My research focuses on applying Game Theory and Industrial Organization models to polluting industries and other regulated markets. I analyze how firms strategically respond to environmental regulation, including their output and pricing decisions, their investments in clean technologies, and merger decisions, both under complete and incomplete information contexts.
This book is an extremely rigorous and formal presentation of Game Theory concepts to Ph.D. students.
The chapters about complete information games and repeated games are particularly superb relative to other advanced books in this field. It also offers chapters on cooperative games, which is quite uncommon in other books (both at the undergraduate and graduate levels.)
The coverage of signaling games, Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium, and equilibrium refinements is relatively brief compared to most other topics in the book, but the book is still great.
Now in its second edition, this popular textbook on game theory is unrivalled in the breadth of its coverage, the thoroughness of technical explanations and the number of worked examples included. Covering non-cooperative and cooperative games, this introduction to game theory includes advanced chapters on auctions, games with incomplete information, games with vector payoffs, stable matchings and the bargaining set. This edition contains new material on stochastic games, rationalizability, and the continuity of the set of equilibrium points with respect to the data of the game. The material is presented clearly and every concept is illustrated with concrete examples from…
I have had a long career as a professor of organizational behavior. My view is that the most ignored and undervalued aspect of leadership is the development and implementation of political skills. Any leader who claims, “I don’t do politics” or “I’m not political,” is not serving themselves very well and, in fact, may be setting themselves up for failure. Whether in organizational life, in the sphere of public policy, or in daily life, we need to overcome the obstacles that impede our capacity to implement agendas and ideas and achieve our aspirations. Dreamers who lack political skills remain dreamers, not leaders.
This book by Graham Allison (revised and expanded with Philip Zelikow) examines how leaders frame problems, gather information, and arrive at decisions and actions in times of crisis and pressure.
The volume examines closely the Cuban Missile Crisis and the processes which led to its resolution. It was a time of immense tension, and the template used by leaders to make their decisions was critical.
While this book is clearly an examination of how government and political leaders operate in arriving at decisions in times of crisis, there are immense implications for any organizational leader.
Allison offers a number of decision-making lenses that are available to leaders: the rational model, based on goal analysis and utility and best payoff; the bureaucratic or organizational process model, based on making decisions embedded in preexisting lines of authority, precedent, repertoires, and templates that have been used before; or the political model, based on…
One of the most influental political science works written in the post World War II era, the original edition of Essence of Decision is a unique and fascinating examination of the pivotal event of the cold Cold War. Not simply revised, but completely re-written, the Second Edition of this classic text is a fresh reinterpretation of the theories and events surrounding the Cuban Missle Crisis, incorporating all new information from the Kennedy tapes and recently declassified Soviet files. Essence of Decision Second Edition, is a vivid look at decision-making under pressure and is the only single volume work that attempts…
During my childhood I heard many stories of economic collapse, depression, and subsequent war. This created an early awareness of the power of financial forces to shape the welfare, security, and life chances of millions. Since then, I have worked to better understand how such things happen and what could be done about them. I have focused on the nature of power and studied the contingent and contested political processes that shape financial orders. This contestation opens up the possibility of change and makes me hope that future financial orders will, eventually, be based on a wiser, more encompassing understanding of welfare, security, and perhaps even justice, than has been the case so far.
I first encountered it when the original 1974 edition was assigned in an undergraduate course on social movement politics. I have never looked back.
Lukes’ three-dimensional view of power, and especially his two and three-dimensional views, make visible the power relations that are at work in areas where power does not seem to be active at all.
This has turned out to be an amazingly helpful way to look at power relations in the modern world. Lukes added two chapters to update his original text in the second edition.
I read Lukes’ work as anticipating constructivist insights. Even though others have since developed these ideas at greater length, in my opinion, this book remains a necessary guide to navigating the twenty-first century.
The third edition of this seminal work includes the original text, first published in 1974, the updates and reflections from the second edition and two groundbreaking new chapters. Power: A Radical View assesses the main debates about how to conceptualize and study power, including the influential contributions of Michel Foucault. The new material includes a development of Lukes's theory of power and presents empirical cases to exemplify this. Including a refreshed introduction, this third edition brings a book that has consolidated its reputation as a classic work and a major reference point within Social and Political Theory to a whole…
Homeless following the death of his adoptive parents in a car crash and the subsequent loss of their farm tenancy, Seb decides to enrol as a residential student at the Asklepios Foundation, a College of Natural Medicine, boasting a sanctuary modelled on an ancient Greek healing temple. Spending a night…
I’m an archaeologist, which means that I’ve been lucky enough to travel to many places to dig and survey ancient remains. What I’ve realized in handling those dusty old objects is that all over the world, in both past and present, people are defined by their stuff: what they made, used, broke, and threw away. Most compelling are the things that people cherished despite being worn or flawed, just like we have objects in our house that are broken or old but that we keep anyway.
Almost everyone has more stuff than they can hold at once. Picking up something new involves setting down something that you already had. Iyengar’s book is the background for every marketing decision ever made, but from the consumer’s perspective: when there is so much stuff in the world, how do you make a choice? Part psychology, part business manual, Iyengar illustrates how much decision-making we do every single day.
Every day we make choices. Coke or Pepsi? Save or spend? Stay or go? Whether mundane or life-altering, these choices define us and shape our lives. Sheena Iyengar asks the difficult questions about how and why we choose: Is the desire for choice innate or bound by culture? Why do we sometimes choose against our best interests? How much control do we really have over what we choose? Her award-winning research reveals that the answers are surprising and profound. In our world of shifting political and cultural forces, technological revolution, and interconnected commerce, our decisions have far-reaching consequences. Use this…
This list opens the door to the inner life of physicians: our hopes, fears, insecurities, and all of the internal and external pressures we face in our training and practice. As a doctor, I see myself in these books—not a superhero with “all of the answers,” but a human being in a profession suffering one of the largest crises of workforce burnout and moral injury. Seeing our physicians as real people will help us feel more empowered to bring our own true selves to the relationship. And really good healthcare is more likely to happen when souls connect.
This is an honest, vulnerable book in which the author, an experienced physician at the top of his game, questions his own approach to patients.
Are we doctors as “scientific” as we think we are, or are we just dependent on rigid protocols and implicit, incorrect beliefs that cause harm? The book provides a road map for doctors and lay readers alike to rethink the doctor-patient relationship and all the decision-making that comes from it.
A groundbreaking, profound view of twenty-first-century medical practice, giving doctors and patients the vital information they need to make better judgments together.
On average, a physician will interrupt a patient describing her symptoms within eighteen seconds. In that short time, many doctors decide on the likely diagnosis and best treatment. Often, decisions made this way are correct, but at crucial moments they can also be wrong—with catastrophic consequences. In this revolutionary book, Jerome Groopman pinpoints the forces and thought processes behind the decisions doctors make, offering direct, intelligent questions patients can ask their doctors to help them get back on…
I have been passionate about continuous learning and understanding why people act the way they do. The books I recommend cover the topic of continuous growth across different states and areas of life.
This is a great book for those interested in promoting change. I like how the book combines stories, examples, and engaging information to present practical strategies that have been used to accomplish change when it seemed difficult to achieve.
Reading this book made me realize small actions can have significant long-term effects when taken consistently and repeatedly. It opened my eyes to the fact that sometimes complex problems require simple solutions.
___________________________________ Change is hard. It doesn't have to be.
We all know that change is hard. It's unsettling, it's time-consuming, and all too often we give up at the first sign of a setback.
But why do we insist on seeing the obstacles rather than the goal? This is the question that bestselling authors Chip and Dan Heath tackle in their compelling and insightful book. They argue that we need only understand how our minds function in order to unlock shortcuts to switches in behaviour.
Illustrating their ideas with scientific studies and remarkable real-life turnarounds - from the secrets of…
Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS
by
Amy Carney,
When I was writing this book, several of my friends jokingly called it the Nazi baby book, with one insisting it would make a great title. Nazi Babies – admittedly, that is a catchy title, but that’s not exactly what my book is about. SS babies would be slightly more…
My passion for developing entrepreneurial and business instinct is simple. It is all based on confidence. Over time, my experiences have shown me that many leaders (myself included) can end up in “decision paralysis” and default to taking no action at all. Leaders can have all of the information and indicators that a decision is the right thing to do, but they default to doing nothing. By developing a better understanding of my own instincts, I have been able to build confidence in the decisions I have made over the past 20 years, thus eliminating any deterrents from making sound decisions.
Blink is a book about how you already know what you don’t know. Malcolm Gladwell breaks down how our instincts and “gut feeling” are always emotional reactions. Those instincts are based on past experiences and knowledge built over time. However, these instincts, whether they are acted upon or not, can be extremely valid even though we have trouble articulating it more than a “sixth sense.”
Explaining how these instincts are developed and (more importantly) learning how to break them down in a way to communicate them in a meaningful way is how many leaders develop emotional intelligence and business acumen.
Intuition is not some magical property that arises unbidden from the depths of our mind. It is a product of long hours and intelligent design, of meaningful work environments and particular rules and principles. This book shows us how we can hone our instinctive ability to know in an instant, helping us to bring out the best in our thinking and become better decision-makers in our homes, offices and in everyday life. Just as he did with his revolutionary theory of the tipping point, Gladwell reveals how the power of blink' could fundamentally transform our relationships, the way we consume,…
