The “Art of Strategy,” written by Barry J. Nalebuff and Avinash K. Dixit is an introductory text on game theory and its applications. In looking for an introduction to Game Theory and this book seemed the best option at the time. I was intrigued by “A Beautiful Mind” but I didn’t love the movie. After reading this, I have put that book on my list. It was referenced a few times and like most movie adaptions was much better than the movie and dives into theories as well as discussing the life of John Nash.
When I was a young man forming my ideas about what to to with my life, economics wasn’t even on my list, architecture was second. Now, if I were to go into academia I think I would pick economics. It has the right amount of math and science combined with the art and unpredictability of human behavior to make it interesting. Dixit and Nalebuff are economists. The book has a bit more intellectual weight behind it than your typical pop business strategy book.
The book takes game theory concepts and applies them to business and other avenues in accessible ways. The book's key strengths lie in its ability to simplify complex game theory ideas through clever examples and storytelling. It introduces and explains the Prisoner’s Dilemma and Nash Equilibrium. Although the book brings real world scenarios and good storytelling it may come off as textbookish for some, complete with examples of homework assignments.
"The Art of Strategy" works as primer for understanding game theory principles and how to think strategically. After reading I felt like I needed to take things to another level to really understand it more fully. In the last chapter they suggest a dozen books to take you there.
The sciences are blending together a bit lately; in my recent post on marriage I read an interesting collaboration between economists and psychologists: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26459/w26459.pdf
Unfortunately I have also read that the field of economics has a lot of publication bias:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/jrsm.1703
"Publication selection bias undermines the systematic accumulation of evidence... Our results indicate that meta-analyses in economics are the most severely contaminated by publication selec-tion bias, closely followed by meta-analyses in environmental sciences and psychology, whereas meta-analyses in medicine are contaminated the least. After adjusting for publication selection bias, the median probability of the presence of an effect decreased from 99.9% to 29.7% in economics, from 98.9% to 55.7% in psychology, from 99.8% to 70.7% in environmental sciences, and from 38.0% to 29.7% in medicine. The median absolute effect sizes (in terms of standardized mean differences) decreased from d = 0.20 to d = 0.07 in economics, from d = 0.37 to d = 0.26 in psychology, from d = 0.62 to d = 0.43 in environmental sciences, and from d = 0.24 to d = 0.13 in medicine."
Economics is an important field; hopefully the situation will improve soon!