Game Theory for Economic Analysis

Comprises lectures given at Tel Aviv University and Oxford University in 1990.

This book considers three relationships: law and economics; economics and game theory; and game theory and law. Economists teach lawyers that economic principles cut across and integrate seemingly different legal subjects such as contracts, torts, and property. Correspondingly, lawyers teach economists that legal rationality is a separate and distinct decision-making process that can be formalized by behavioral rules that are parallel to and comparable with the behavioral rules of economic rationality, that efficiency often must be constrained by legal goals such as equal protection of the laws, due process, and horizontal and distributional equity, and that the general case methodology of economics vs. the hard case methodology of law for determining the truth or falsity of economic theories and theorems sometimes conflict. Economics and Game Theory: Law and economics books focus on economic analysis of judges’ decisions in common law cases and have been mostly limited to contracts, torts, property, criminal law, and suit and settlement. There is usually no discussion of the many areas of law that require cooperative action such as is needed to provide economic infrastructure, control public “bad” type externalities, and make legislation. Game theory provides the bridge between competitive markets and the missing discussion of cooperative action in law and economics. How? Competitive markets are examples (subset) of the Prisoners’ Dilemma, which explains the conflict between individual self-interested behavior and cooperation both in economic markets and in legislative bodies and demonstrates the need for social infrastructure and regulation of pollution and global warming. Game Theory and Law: Lawsuits usually involve litigation between two parties, not the myriad participants in markets, so the assumption of self-interest constrained by markets does not carry over to legal disputes involving one-on-one bargaining in which the law gives one party superior bargaining power. Game theory models predict the effect of different legal institutions, rights, and rules on the outcome of such bargaining. Game theory also has a natural four-model framework which is used in this book to analyze the law and economics of civil obligation, which consists of torts (negligence), contracts, and unjust enrichment.

Mathematical economics and game theory approached with the fundamental mathematical toolbox of nonlinear functional analysis are the central themes of this text. Both optimization and equilibrium theories are covered in full detail. The book's central application is the fundamental economic problem of allocating scarce resources among competing agents, which leads to considerations of the interrelated applications in game theory and the theory of optimization. Mathematicians, mathematical economists, and operations research specialists will find that it provides a solid foundation in nonlinear functional analysis. This text begins by developing linear and convex analysis in the context of optimization theory. The treatment includes results on the existence and stability of solutions to optimization problems as well as an introduction to duality theory. The second part explores a number of topics in game theory and mathematical economics, including two-person games, which provide the framework to study theorems of nonlinear analysis. The text concludes with an introduction to non-linear analysis and optimal control theory, including an array of fixed point and subjectivity theorems that offer powerful tools in proving existence theorems.

This book presents the huge variety of current contributions of game theory to economics. The impressive contributions fall broadly into two categories. Some lay out in a jargon free manner a particular branch of the theory, the evolution of one of its concepts, or a problem, that runs through its development. Others are original pieces of work tha

This is the classic work upon which modern-day game theory is based. What began as a modest proposal that a mathematician and an economist write a short paper together blossomed, when Princeton University Press published Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. In it, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern conceived a groundbreaking mathematical theory of economic and social organization, based on a theory of games of strategy. Not only would this revolutionize economics, but the entirely new field of scientific inquiry it yielded--game theory--has since been widely used to analyze a host of real-world phenomena from arms races to optimal policy choices of presidential candidates, from vaccination policy to major league baseball salary negotiations. And it is today established throughout both the social sciences and a wide range of other sciences.

This book is the first to apply the tools of game theory and information economics to advance our understanding of how laws work. Organized around the major solution concepts of game theory, it shows how such well known games as the prisoner's dilemma, the battle of the sexes, beer-quiche, and the Rubinstein bargaining game can illuminate many different kinds of legal problems. Game Theory and the Law highlights the basic mechanisms at work and lays out a natural progression in the sophistication of the game concepts and legal problems considered.

Modern option pricing theory was developed in the late sixties and early seventies by F. Black, R. e. Merton and M. Scholes as an analytical tool for pricing and hedging option contracts and over-the-counter warrants. How ever, already in the seminal paper by Black and Scholes, the applicability of the model was regarded as much broader. In the second part of their paper, the authors demonstrated that a levered firm's equity can be regarded as an option on the value of the firm, and thus can be priced by option valuation techniques. A year later, Merton showed how the default risk structure of cor porate bonds can be determined by option pricing techniques. Option pricing models are now used to price virtually the full range of financial instruments and financial guarantees such as deposit insurance and collateral, and to quantify the associated risks. Over the years, option pricing has evolved from a set of specific models to a general analytical framework for analyzing the production process of financial contracts and their function in the financial intermediation process in a continuous time framework. However, very few attempts have been made in the literature to integrate game theory aspects, i. e. strategic financial decisions of the agents, into the continuous time framework. This is the unique contribution of the thesis of Dr. Alexandre Ziegler. Benefiting from the analytical tractability of contin uous time models and the closed form valuation models for derivatives, Dr.

'These two volumes constitute an impressive collection of selected path-breaking works of Professor Selten. . . . Edward Elgar Publications deserve merit for bringing out most frequently-cited and prominent articles of Professor Selten in a conveniently available package.' - K. Ravikumar, Journal of Scientific and Industrial Research In 1994, the Nobel Prize was awarded to Reinhard Selten, John Nash and John Harsanyi, for pioneering analysis in game theory. Selten was the first to refine the Nash equilibrium concept of non-cooperative games for analysing dynamic strategic interaction and to apply these concepts to analyses of oligopoly.

Eminently suited to classroom use as well as individual study, Roger Myerson's introductory text provides a clear and thorough examination of the models, solution concepts, results, and methodological principles of noncooperative and cooperative game theory. Myerson introduces, clarifies, and synthesizes the extraordinary advances made in the subject over the past fifteen years, presents an overview of decision theory, and comprehensively reviews the development of the fundamental models: games in extensive form and strategic form, and Bayesian games with incomplete information. Game Theory will be useful for students at the graduate level in economics, political science, operations research, and applied mathematics. Everyone who uses game theory in research will find this book essential.