Reddit Reddit reviews Game Theory (The MIT Press)

We found 7 Reddit comments about Game Theory (The MIT Press). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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Game Theory (The MIT Press)
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7 Reddit comments about Game Theory (The MIT Press):

u/[deleted] · 19 pointsr/math

What are you interested in learning about? I would be weary about the books peppajac217 suggested, I don't know anything about them, but such books usually don't go into any detail and are often very biased (some of the amazon reviews make them sound pretty awful). (Come on guys and girls, this is the math reddit, don't be like the rest of the idiots who claim economics is all bullshit and only ever used for bad reasons, that is incredibly naive and stupid).

Game theory (not sure if that needs explaining or not?) is used a lot for economic theory (particularly for microeconomics), so having at least a basic understanding of that can be useful, and it's a really fun topic. If you want a simple treatment, get Osbornes introductory text, otherwise get either Myersons or Fudenberg and Tiroles.

Microeconomics is mostly concerned with situations/decisions at the "micro" level, whether that be for individuals, producers, small groups etc. My favourite part of microeconomics is consumer theory which concerns itself with how people can optimally use their time and resources to maximise the enjoyment they get out of life. The core consumer theory basically assumes people/consumers are able to form a total order over the set of goods as otherwise you get messy properties (like cyclic ordering), a lot of people give economics flack for such assumptions, they're idiots, due to the impredictable nature of human decision making, economics is quite complicated, but it doesn't mean people shouldn't try to study it, such assumptions allow us to make interesting insights into the problem being studied (something physicists and other scientists do all the time) and one can always relax any of the assumptions they wish when analysing stuff if they want to. There is also producer theory which concerns itself with how producers can optimally produce to maximise benefit to society, profits or any other such objective, then general equilibrium theory basically takes these two subjects and throws them together to study it all at once, although the basics often take out producers and deal with a set of consumers with a starting allocation of resources. If you are more interested in learning about microeconomics, the most common graduate level text is the one from Mas-Collel, Green and Whinston, although you might want to look somewhere else to get a basic understanding of microeconomics before jumping right into that text. (People bitch about the amount of maths in that text, but if you have some background with differential equations, linear algebra and real analysis (ripping that straight from an amazon review, but it's about on par) then I don't see why you shouldn't be able to follow it).

Another part of microeconomics that is really interesting is industrial organisation (although one could possibly just class it with producer theory) which is concerned with studying the different types of market structure, like competitive markets, monopolies, duopolies etc. I'm not really sure about resources for this, I believe Tiroles text is considered good.

And now we get to macroeconomics, which is a beast. I work as an RA for a macroeconomist, have a degree in economics (I did undergrad majors in cs, economics and maths, I'm currently doing an honours year in pure maths) and yet the more I learn about macroeconomics, the less I feel like I understand what the fuck is going on. I feel like a lot of people equate economics with predicting the future state of an/the economy (like studying weather is only concerned with predicting the temperature long in the future? or biology is only concerned with predicting the exact population of a species long into the future?) which can be really annoying, but generally macroeconomics concerns itself with what happens aggregately and how that affects us as a whole. I'm not even going to attempt to suggest where the best place to look for learning macroeconomics, as I have no idea. Just note that it's rather complicated (anyone that claims otherwise is an idiot) and there is often a lot of disagreement on the topics that arise. Generally most economists consider most of the Austrian school to be a bunch of whackos (which is most certainly true for the large bulk of self called "Austrian economists" with absolutely no economics training, or a couple of undergraduate classes in college), I personally don't feel I have a good enough understanding to really hold my own opinions (not like it stops everyone else from it though right? It really annoys me how many people are willing to have an opinion on economics but not with physics or a lot of other subjects).

Edit: I should probably mention econometrics, which is basically the application of statistics to testing claims in economics. Sure that's a bit "shady", but as I've mentioned before, economics is complicated, having a "best approximation" of things is better than making wild guesses. One problem is that a lot of "economists" are idiots and shouldn't be calling themselves as such, and hence a lot of the work they do is absolute garbage as they aren't suitably qualified to analyse stuff at a level of rigour that I would consider acceptable with our current knowledge of maths and other subjects, this is also a problem in the natural sciences, but nowhere near as much as with economics and other social sciences.

Edit2: Actually, a fun topic is international economics (which arguably fits into macroeconomics), learn what comparative advantage is and why trade is generally considered good for society as a whole.

u/zifyoip · 8 pointsr/mathbooks

Linear programming:

u/wspaniel · 7 pointsr/math

That depends on how basic you want to get. Game Theory 101 is as introductory as it gets but also avoids most of the deeper mathematical stuff that a subscriber of this subreddit might want. Fudenberg and Tirole is the standard text but is very complicated and expensive. There's also this open access textbook that I often recommend to my students.

Regardless of which way you go, you may find my Game Theory 101 lecture series useful.

Also, come join us on /r/gametheory!

u/econ_learner · 5 pointsr/badeconomics

The two I've used were Osbourne & Rubinstein and Fudenberg & Tirole. I found OR to be more "technically" written, and therefore easier to understand for someone learning the material. FT was just a bit too conversational for me.

I'm curious about people's thoughts on Myerson's textbook.

u/Ponderay · 2 pointsr/AskEconomics

Dixit, Skeath and Reiley is the standard undergrad text. And Fundeberg and Tirole is the standard graduate level book. Gibbons is somewhere in between the two.

u/brentonk · 1 pointr/math

The canonical text (which by now is outdated, but that's OK if you're just starting with game theory) is Fudenberg and Tirole's Game Theory (1991). The book isn't lacking for rigor; they dive right into fixed point theorems and the like in the first chapter.

u/ryporter · 1 pointr/math

I agree that O&R is a good reference book, and I'd also recommend Fudenberg & Tirole for a more verbose (but still precise) introduction.