Reddit reviews Game Theory

I cant speak to your specific problem, but as far as evolutionary game theory goes in general, you only need to know through calculus 3 to be able to solve a problem. Understanding how to test a specific solution to determine if it's an evolutionary stable strategy or not is a bit harder. The idea here is that it's a population that is essentially playing against itself, so some optimal strategies that would generally work in regular game theory don't make any sense in context. And if I remember correctly, there are other optimal strategies that simply aren't stable and are thrown out as well.

With all that said, if your game is bigger than 3x3 you're really going to want to use a computer. It get's tremendously complex.

I learned it from Owen's text: http://www.amazon.com/Game-Theory-Guillermo-Owen/dp/0125311516/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1349044502&sr=8-1&keywords=game+theory+owen

for most of the book you need to know up to real analysis but that section didn't require anything over calc III (unless you're trying to follow the proofs).

There's no such thing as a perfect voting system due to Arrow's impossibility theorem, so you're just trading off disadvantages. The main problem with a standard top-two runoff (which is pretty much equivalent to an open primary) is vote splitting between candidates of the same party. The advantages are that it's easy to understand, easy to explain to people, easy to implement without major changes to voting machines, and is already in use by several states. This makes it much more likely to be switched to in practice. Perfect? No, but neither is instant runoff voting.

Fun tidbit: I have a book (Game Theory, third edition, by Guillermo Owen) which provides an example of an electorate where six different voting systems, including ranked choice, each result in a different candidate being elected! The theory of voting systems is really weird. Edit: I can't find the example in that book, I may be misremembering which book it's from.