Search Articles Database:  Search By:   
    RightBiz.com Article Directory & Info Portal
    Home Business & Internet Marketing Resources
      Blog        Article Directory       Newsletter       Business News       Go Shopping       Office Supplies       Art Prints
Free Content Syndication

Home | Games


Pastime Theory

By: Robert Thomson

Game theory is a branch of functional mathematics that is used in the communal sciences (most notably economics), biology, political science, computer science, and philosophy. Game theory attempts to mathematically capture behavior in strategic situations, in which an individual's success in making choices depends on the choices of others. While initially developed to analyze competitions in which one individual does better at another's expenditure (zero sum games), it has been prolonged to treat a wide class of communications, which are classified according to several criteria.

Traditional applications of game theory attempt to find balance in these games—sets of strategies in which individuals are doubtful to change their conduct. Many equilibrium concepts have been developed (most famously the Nash equilibrium) in an attempt to capture this idea. These equilibrium concepts are motivated differently depending on the field of application, although they often overlap or coincide. This tactic is not without criticism, and debates continue over the appropriateness of particular equilibrium concepts, the appropriateness of equilibrium altogether, and the usefulness of mathematical models more generally.

Although some developments occurred before it, the meadow of game theory came into being with the 1944 book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. This theory was developed extensively in the 1950s by many scholars. Game theory was later explicitly applied to ecology in the 1970s, although similar developments go back at least as far as the 1930s. Game theory has been widely recognized as an important instrument in many fields. The first known discussion of game theory occurred in a letter written by James Waldegrave in 1713. In this letter, Waldegrave provides a minimax mixed approach solution to a two-person version of the card game Le Her. It was not until the publication of Antoine Augustin Cournot's Researches into the Mathematical Principles of the Theory of Wealth in 1838 that a general game theoretic analysis was pursued. In this work Cournot considers a duopoly and presents a solution that is a limited version of the Nash equilibrium.



Article Source: http://www.rightbiz.com

John writes for rake back. Visit them for more articles about absolute rakeback.

Please Rate this Article

 

Not yet Rated

Click the XML Icon Above to Receive Games Articles Via RSS!

P.O. Box 302, St. Marys, Sydney, NSW 1790, Australia
Email: webmaster@rightbiz.com; Int. Fax: +61 2 9675 2384

Powered by Article Dashboard