Selected applications, drawn from a range of fields in economics, are treated in some depth. He covers the standard fare of noncooperative game theory and its applications in political science, especially the role of legislative voting rules, deterrence in international crises, voting in elections and bargaining. Aimed at the general reader as well as the legal scholar, this book provides not only a new domain of application for game theory, but also new insights into the way in which laws affect the way people behave. A glossary of legal and economic terms makes the book accessible to a wider audience. Though dated, it still merits reading for its powerful and important insights, such as the value of commitment and the role of focal points in selecting equilibria.
Successive sections are devoted to negotiation, contracting and bidding.
They are illustrated by real life examples, ranging from the social behaviour of pigs and the salaries of baseball players, through politics and the Iran-Iraq war, to bidding for Olympic games broadcast rights and a comparison of the use of subcontracting in Japanese and US industry. One of the earliest applications of game theory was to the study of market behaviour. Bargaining games are a special class of games, whose simplified structure makes them more tractable for formal analysis. Recent research has seen a convergence in the cooperative and noncooperative approaches to these games. The first half of this book is an authoritative account of this work, in which a small number of models are explored in depth.