Theory of Conditional Games

Description

Game theory explains how to make good choices when different decision makers have conflicting interests. The classical approach assumes that decision makers are committed to making the best choices for themselves regardless of the effect on others, but such an approach is less appropriate when cooperation, compromise and negotiation are important. This book describes conditional games, a form of game theory that accommodates multiple stakeholder decision-making scenarios where cooperation and negotiation are significant issues and where notions of concordant group behavior are important. Using classical binary preference relations as a point of departure, the book extends the concept of a preference ordering that permits stakeholders to modulate their preferences as functions of the preferences of others. As these conditional preferences propagate through a group of decision makers, they create social bonds that lead to notions of group concordance. This book is intended for all students and researchers of decision theory and game theory.

Wynn C. Stirling is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Dean of Graduate Studies at Brigham Young University. His current research interests include multi-agent decision theory, estimation theory, information theory and stochastic processes. He is the author or co-author of more than seventy publications, including the graduate text Mathematical Methods and Algorithms for Signal Processing (with Todd Moon) and the monograph Satisficing Games and Decision Making.

'... in my opinion Stirling's book is the most important new basis for novel extensions and applications of game theory since the invention of stochastic equilibrium ideas two decades ago.' Journal of Economic Methodology