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Own List
ECONOMICS BOOKS
THE BEST BOOKS ON GAME THEORY
RECOMMENDED BY ARIEL RUBINSTEIN
ECONOMIC FABLES
BY ARIEL RUBINSTEIN
Read
Game theory is marketed as a system you can apply to any sphere of life, but
does it really have much to offer in terms of practical application? The
distinguished game theorist, Ariel Rubinstein, suggests not. He recommends the
best books on game theory.
Interview by Sophie Roell, Editor
ECONOMIC FABLES
BY ARIEL RUBINSTEIN
Read
Buy all books
Read
1
THEORY OF GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
BY JOHN VON NEUMANN AND OSKAR MORGENSTERN
Read
2
GAMES AND DECISIONS
BY R DUNCAN LUCE AND HOWARD RAIFFA
Read
3
COLLECTED PAPERS
BY ROBERT J AUMANN
Read
4
A BEAUTIFUL MIND
BY SYLVIA NASAR
Read
5
NO TITLE
*
*
*
*
*
* 1 THEORY OF GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR BY JOHN VON NEUMANN AND OSKAR
MORGENSTERN
* 2 GAMES AND DECISIONS BY R DUNCAN LUCE AND HOWARD RAIFFA
* 3 COLLECTED PAPERS BY ROBERT J AUMANN
* 4 A BEAUTIFUL MIND BY SYLVIA NASAR
* 5 NO TITLE
What is game theory?
The way I think about game theory is that it’s a part of economic theory, a set
of models and concepts that is supposed to capture the way we think about
strategic interactive situations. These are situations when my reasonable
behaviour depends on the way that I perceive or believe that the other
participants in the situation will behave. I want to get into the shoes of the
other player or players – I want to enter their mind. That’s crucial for my
decision. It’s not like a situation where I’m trying to decide whether to take
an umbrella or not, and all I have to think about is the chance it will rain
this afternoon. But I can do it in many ways and I can respond in many ways.
What is special about game theory is that until now it has been assumed that
when the players respond to the other players they respond rationally.
People are presumed to be rational?
Yes, classical game theory deals with situations where people are fully
rational. In principle we could think about interactive situations where players
are not fully rational, but nevertheless take into account or anticipate other
players’ behaviour. But the body of knowledge that is known as game theory, at
least up to now, has focused mainly on situations where the players are
rational.
What are the applications of game theory for real life?
That’s a central question: Is game theory useful in a concrete sense or not?
Game theory is an area of economics that has enjoyed fantastic public relations.
John Von Neumann, one of the founders of game theory, was not only a genius in
mathematics, he was also a genius in public relations. The choice of the name
“theory of games” was brilliant as a marketing device. The word “game” has
friendly, enjoyable associations. It gives a good feeling to people. It reminds
us of our childhood, of chess and checkers, of children’s games. The
associations are very light, not heavy, even though you may be trying to deal
with issues like nuclear deterrence. I think it’s a very tempting idea for
people, that they can take something simple and apply it to situations that are
very complicated, like the economic crisis or nuclear deterrence. But this is an
illusion. Now my views, I have to say, are extreme compared to many of my
colleagues. I believe that game theory is very interesting. I’ve spent a lot of
my life thinking about it, but I don’t respect the claims that it has direct
applications.
“The choice of the name ‘theory of games’ was brilliant as a marketing device.
The word “game” has friendly, enjoyable associations – even though you may be
trying to deal with issues like nuclear deterrence.”
The analogy I sometimes give is from logic. Logic is a very interesting field in
philosophy, or in mathematics. But I don’t think anybody has the illusion that
logic helps people to be better performers in life. A good judge does not need
to know logic. It may turn out to be useful – logic was useful in the
development of the computer sciences, for example – but it’s not directly
practical in the sense of helping you figure out how best to behave tomorrow,
say in a debate with friends, or when analysing data that you get as a judge or
a citizen or as a scientist.
So the situation of the prisoner’s dilemma couldn’t arise in real life?
I didn’t say that. In game theory, what we’re doing is saying, “Let’s try to
abstract our thinking about strategic situations.” Game theorists are very good
at abstracting some very complicated situations and putting some elements of the
situations into a formal model. In general, my view about formal models is that
a model is a fable. Game theory is about a collection of fables. Are fables
useful or not? In some sense, you can say that they are useful, because good
fables can give you some new insight into the world and allow you to think about
a situation differently. But fables are not useful in the sense of giving you
advice about what to do tomorrow, or how to reach an agreement between the West
and Iran. The same is true about game theory. A main difference between game
theory and literature is that game theory is written in formal, mathematical
language. That has advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are that the
formal language allows us to be more precise, it allows us to get rid of
associations that are not relevant and it allows us to better examine some
arguments. The disadvantage of formal language is the level of abstraction,
which has two main downsides. First of all, it makes the theory very far away
from one minus epsilon of the population. Even among the academic community,
most people who claim to use game theory hardly understand it. Secondly,
abstraction has the negative side that once you abstract things, you miss a lot
of the information and most of the details, which in real life are very
relevant.
In general, I would say there were too many claims made by game theoreticians
about its relevance. Every book of game theory starts with “Game theory is very
relevant to everything that you can imagine, and probably many things that you
can’t imagine.” In my opinion that’s just a marketing device.
Why do it then?
First, because it is interesting. And I’m not saying it isn’t useful in indirect
ways. I believe that intellectual thinking – philosophy or logic or game theory
– is very useful in the cultural sense. It’s part of the culture, it’s a part of
our perpetual attempt to understand ourselves better and understand the way that
we think. What I’m opposing is the approach that says, in a practical situation,
“OK, there are some very clever game theoreticians in the world, let’s ask them
what to do.” I have not seen, in all my life, a single example where a game
theorist could give advice, based on the theory, which was more useful than that
of the layman.
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There is probably a confusion in the public between the personal abilities of
game theorists and the power of the theory itself. The community of game
theoreticians contains some brilliant people who have also “two legs on ground”.
This rare combination is very useful. People like that can come up with
interesting and original ideas. Not everyone – there are brilliant game
theoreticians who I would not ask for any practical advice. But the advice of
the other, even if it is good, should not lean on an authority.
Looking at the flipside, was there ever a situation in which you were pleasantly
surprised at what game theory was able to deliver?
None. Not only none, but my point would be that categorically game theory cannot
do it. Maybe somewhere in a Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie story there was a
situation where the detective was very clever and he applied some logical trick
that somehow caught the criminal, something like that. You know in America there
was a programme on CBS, called Numbers, written Numb3rs, with the ‘e’ reversed.
Numb3rs wanted to make people curious about mathematics through detective
stories. I happened to hear about it because I had done some experimental work
with Amos Tversky and Dana Heller, about the game of hide and seek. In one of
the episodes they refer to the paper. Of course it was a joke, but the fact that
my name was mentioned in such a programme made me very happy. But outside such
programmes, I categorically cannot see any case where game theory could be
helpful.
So if people study it, it should be just for love of the subject?
That’s my position about academic life in general. Universities and academic
research are not supposed to be useful in a direct sense. I’m not talking about
research like in medicine – that’s a completely different story – but I’m
talking about social sciences and humanities, which I am more familiar with. The
social sciences and humanities, in my opinion, should not have any pretension to
be directly useful. We are part of the culture. We are useful as sculptures are.
Maybe a sculpture that will be put in Central Park in New York will prove to
have a lot of influence on people. So are our models.
The case of the computer sciences is interesting. For many years the Israeli
computer scientists were criticised because the computer sciences were too
abstract in Israel, whereas in other places they were thinking more in terms of
practical applications. But I think that people will agree now that the big
success of the Israeli hi-tech industry in the last 20 years is also the outcome
of the abstract way computer sciences was taught in places like Jerusalem in the
seventies and eighties. That created the cultural environment on which the
unbelievable success and flourishing of the hi-tech industry of Israel since the
1990s is based. This is a case where abstraction led indirectly to something
practical. Of course, I’m not against something practical coming out eventually
of abstract studies but it is not the target. Of course I can give you examples
where game theoreticians, because they were intelligent, gave good advice – and
probably some examples where game theoreticians gave bad advice.
By the way, I don’t know enough about it, but it’s very interesting to
investigate the role of game theoreticians in the development of American policy
on nuclear deterrence. Thomas Schelling and John von Neumann and many other
lions of game theory were connected to this effort. Some people, including John
Nash, were working for a few months or years in RAND and thinking about
strategic situations like that. From a historical point of view, I think it’s
interesting whether indeed there was any real effect to game theorists in the
1950s. Now in Israel, again, given the situation with Iran, the question of
whether game theory can tell us anything is in the air. I hope that the Israeli
government will not consult game theorists regarding its hard strategic
decisions.
Read
1
THEORY OF GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
BY JOHN VON NEUMANN AND OSKAR MORGENSTERN
Read
Some of these people you’re talking about come up in the books you’ve chosen, so
let’s talk start talking about those. What did you have in mind when you chose
this list? Are these the classics of game theory?
The first one I chose was the Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, by John von
Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. There was game theory before von
Neumann-Morgenstern, and, as with any field, people are now saying “in 1921 so
and so did so and so”. I’m sure at the end of the day, someone will find
something relevant also in the Talmud or Greek writings. But von
Neumann-Morgenstern was the first comprehensive, systematic attempt to put many
game theoretical ideas together. They set up the style, the concepts, some of
the basic solution concepts and the level of abstraction.
Von Neumann was a brilliant mathematician and Morgenstern was an economist. I
imagine if someone else had written the first book – for example a philosopher –
game theory could have gone down a completely different path. It’s beautiful to
see, the implicit or explicit decisions about the terms and the language. These
decisions determined the content and the borders of the field. It’s very
difficult to break those borders later.
The book does have pretensions. I read from page one: “The purpose of this book
is to present a discussion of some fundamental questions of economic theory
which require a treatment different from that which they have found thus far in
the literature.” It’s an interesting sentence – what does it make us feel? First
of all that it’s different, a different set of models than the previous economic
models, and that it’s about fundamental questions of economic theory. It was
different, we agree on that. It took another 30 years or so for it to be
absorbed into the main body of economic theory. So I think this book is
definitely on this list of five, because it set the tone and because of its
brilliant ideas.
Do you still use this book?
These days I use it less and less. After JSTOR it became very easy to search in
papers and journal articles but books are hard to search. This is changing now.
More and more books are available on the web. The more they are searchable, the
more we’ll use them again. It’s a book that has been referenced a lot, though
I’m sure most of the references are from people who did not open it.
I cannot say I use it daily, and if a student comes and tells me, “I want to
learn game theory,” it will not be the first book I’d recommend. That would be a
more standard book, that teaches the concepts in a didactic way, summarising
what was happening over the past almost 70 years. But in the second wave, I
would advise him to read the book, especially if he really wants to get into the
theory. People sometimes say, “Book X is the bible of a field.” This is not. I
don’t actually know any bible of game theory, and probably it’s good that there
isn’t one. Because once there’s a bible in the field, it’s very difficult to
make a change. A “bible” might be the beginning and the end of a field.
Read
2
GAMES AND DECISIONS
BY R DUNCAN LUCE AND HOWARD RAIFFA
Read
Let’s talk about your next book, Games and Decisions.
This book is written by another two brilliant people, R Duncan Luce and Howard
Raiffa. The book was written in the mid-1950s, so about 10 years after von
Neumann-Morgernstern and of course it’s a book that was influenced a lot by von
Neumann-Morgenstern. It’s a less formal book. It’s written beautifully. It’s a
book about which I’m always saying to students, “There are many ideas in there
that still have not been developed.”
Luce and Raiffa were thinking about elements of what we would probably now call
modern choice theory. Standard classical choice theory deals with rationality,
ways of applying rationality into decision problems. Their mode of thinking is
natural, that’s what I like about this book (and much of game theory in
general). It’s really on the bridge between natural thinking and formal
thinking. Von Neumann-Morgenstern set the formal models, and Luce and Raiffa
went one step back. You can see this in the subtitle of the book, Games and
Decisions: Introduction and Critical Survey. The book is dedicated to the memory
of von Neumann, but at the same time they did not shy away from criticising the
rationality approach.
By the way, von Neumann-Morgenstern was not only the beginning of game theory.
There is also a very important chapter about the expected utility model. This is
the basic model which is still used by almost everybody in economics regarding
decision-making under uncertainty. It’s the foundation not just of game theory,
but of almost everything in economic theory which involves uncertainty. Luce and
Raiffa criticised this theory and suggested some ideas and alternatives which
are followed up 30 to 40 years later.
Read
3
COLLECTED PAPERS
BY ROBERT J AUMANN
Read
Let’s go on to your next book, a collection of papers by Robert Aumann, winner
of the 2005 Nobel prize in economics, and, like you, an Israeli.
This collection is interesting for several reasons. Firstly, Bob Aumann is a
very special man. I disagree with him about his political views – he is a
right-wing person. I disagree with him about his current position on “what game
theory is about”. From time to time he expresses views – about politics for
example – backed with the authority of the great game theoretician. I don’t like
those statements. In spite of this fact, I admire him for his academic work and
personality. First of all, there is a beauty in his writing. He’s a master in
the way he writes, whatever he writes, and the way he uses formal models to talk
about game theory. It’s probably very difficult for someone outside the field to
appreciate it, but there is an aesthetic to it. Aumann’s style contrasts the
dominating style in current economics. It’s with a lot of – if I may use the
word – bullshit, a lot of over-pretensions to be useful. In many current papers
in economic theory models are not models, proofs are not proofs. The strive for
generality is misleading as every model is not more than a tiny example.
Aumann has the ability to use sophisticated mathematical tools more than almost
all other game theorists. But he is not tempted. He always tries to think in
examples. He’s always striving for the most simple model. Aumann is really a
master of using formal models.
People ask, “Why is game theory so popular in Israel?” One explanation is
Aumann’s charming personality. His role in Israeli game theory reminds me of
that of a rabbi in Jewish orthodox communities. Another explanation is the
traditions among religious Jews – which have also had an effect on non-religious
Jews – of the study of the Talmud. The study of the Talmud is not practical. For
example, scholars of the Talmud were studying the question of what to do in the
temple place during the entire 2,000 years we were disconnected from Jerusalem.
One of the things that is beautiful about the Talmudic thinking is that it’s
based on study of examples. The examples are very simple scenarios which
demonstrate something deep. I believe that Aumann is influenced by this Talmudic
way of thinking.
Read
4
A BEAUTIFUL MIND
BY SYLVIA NASAR
Read
Time to talk about your next book, A Beautiful Mind.
This book is completely different. I picked it because when you think about the
field you think also about the people who were involved. Of course the story of
Aumann, the story of many other people, is interesting, but Nash’s story also
has a message. The message is completely separate from game theory, but
nevertheless, it happened around the development of game theory. Sylvia Nasar’s
book is a brilliant book because she made a deliberate decision not to explain
game theory. What she describes is a human drama.
Sylvia Nasar was a reporter for the New York Times when she covered the success
of the telecommunications spectrum auctions in 1994. The auction was described –
in my opinion wrongly – by the popular press and by some game theoreticians as
the glorious success of the field of game theory, in terms of making it
applicable. But in any case, the success was in contrast to the misery of one of
its important contributors, John Nash.
In case – despite the movie starring Russell Crowe – anyone doesn’t know the
story, John Nash suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and spent years just
wandering around the campus of Princeton University, where he’d been a graduate
student.
The story of John Nash is really a human story – I don’t think it sheds much
light on game theory. In a field like economic theory the personality of the
author is not relevant to understanding the subject matter. You might not know
that Aumann is a religious Jew, you might think he is a Chinese Buddhist, but
nevertheless whatever he wrote will still have the same meaning. That’s probably
less true about philosophers or writers. That’s both the power and the weakness
of formal models. So this book does not help to understand the field better, but
it has a human message. It gives hope to people dealing with this terrible
mental disease. Because of my involvement in the story of Nash, I came to talk
to many people about it, and I feel that the story of Nash gave them a lot of
hope.
Just to be clear, you feature a bit in the book because you fought to get Nash
recognised by the field. I love the line in the book, your response when you
fail to get Nash elected to one of these societies: “Ariel had a fit.”
I was marginally involved in the story of Nash in a couple of ways described in
the book. One was making him a fellow in the Econometric Society. This was at
the time I was at the London School of Economics, in the mid- to late 1980s. The
other nominating committee members were open-minded, famous economists.
Nevertheless, I was outvoted four to one against making John Nash a fellow. It’s
just an honour. But his mental state influenced even that. A year after it was,
of course, corrected.
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There’s a big contrast between the attitude to Nash then and now, when Nash is
invited to give lectures around the world. His lectures and recovery are
important as they give hope to the very large community of people that have
family who are sick. He gives an opportunity to people to discuss society’s
attitude to mental illness. So I chose A Beautiful Mind as an important human
story behind the story of game theory.
And his contribution to economics is absolutely central, isn’t it? You use Nash
equilibrium all the time.
Yes, but it is not that Nash was the first to use Nash equilibrium. People were
using the concept before Nash. But he put it into an elegant framework and
showed about it whatever he showed. He did a crucial move but I would be very
careful not to say, “Without Nash game theory would not develop.” Without
diminishing the importance of it, I don’t think Nash contributed much to the
discussion of what Nash equilibrium is.
Read
5
NO TITLE
Read
So, your last book. You told me it was going to be a surprise.
Yes, I promised you a surprise as the fifth book. The fifth book is a book that
has not been written yet. That’s the point. The fifth book is a lacuna, it’s a
space that has to be filled. The book which, in my opinion, is so much waiting
to be written is a book that will criticise game theory. Not from a sociological
point of view, not a personality analysis of people like Aumann or Shapley or
Schelling or whoever, but a purely intellectual analysis. There is a need for a
book that counters the natural tendency of people to find in game theory
solutions to problems that in my opinion game theory doesn’t say anything about.
I’ve tried to do something small in this direction, in a book – Economic Fables.
But my book is not more than a call for such a book.
I think people reading this interview would enjoy it a lot. It’s pretty funny –
about the bar scene in A Beautiful Mind, for example, and how that’s got nothing
to do with any idea of Nash’s. But also, your discussions of experiments, and
how a knowledge of game theory would actually make you worse off if you were
playing these games in real life.
Yes, many of the ideas that we talked about you’ll find in the book. But, again,
I’m not recommending my book. The challenge is to take a chapter like my chapter
two – which discusses game theory – and develop it into a full book, which will
explain the limitations of game theory. This is the missing book.
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You’ve spent so much of this interview talking about the limitations of game
theory. It makes me wonder, what motivated you to become a game theorist in the
first place? What attracted you to it?
I studied mathematics, though actually I wasn’t so interested in mathematics per
se. I had this naive feeling that behind the symbols there was something more,
which is connected with life. It’s a little bit like going to a zoo. You see
animals, but you don’t think about the animals, you think about situations in
life. You think, “Ah! The situation among the elephants is something that I
recognise in my personal life.” That may not be the best analogy, but that’s the
kind of feeling I had when I was a student. It’s not that I wanted to be
practical – I never had the illusion that what I did had any practical value –
but I wanted to understand argumentation better. Human argumentation was always
something I was interested in. I wanted to be a lawyer. As a child I thought of
a lawyer as someone who goes to court, makes arguments in favour of justice and
wins over evil. My thinking was that formal models could help in this respect,
from an intellectual point of view. And that’s all. If you ask me now whether I
would repeat my life in this way, I don’t think so. If I could repeat my life, I
would probably follow my unfulfilled dream to be a lawyer.
Interview by Sophie Roell, Editor
December 6, 2016
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Economics Books
Ariel Rubinstein
Ariel Rubinstein is an Israeli economist who works in game theory. He is a
professor of economics at the School of Economics at Tel Aviv University and the
Department of Economics at New York University. His books include Economic
Fables
Economics Books
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