Theory of games and economic behavior

By John von Neumann, Oskar Morgenstern. 1945

This is the classic work upon which modern-day game theory is based. What began more than sixty years ago as a modest proposal that a mathematician and an economist write a short paper together blossomed, in 1944, when Princeton University Press published "Theory of Games and Economic Behavior." In it, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern conceived a groundbreaking mathematical theory of economic and social organization, based on a theory of games of strategy. Not only would this revolutionize economics, but the entirely new field of scientific inquiry it yielded--game theory--has since been widely used to analyze a host of real-world phenomena from arms races to optimal policy choices of presidential candidates, from vaccination policy to major league baseball salary negotiations. And it is today established throughout both the social sciences and a wide range of other sciences.

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Citations in the corpus

Explanation Methods in Deep Learning: Users, Values, Concerns and Challenges (2018, background): “This speaks for the inclusion of decision-theoretic constructs in deciding on optimal actionable outcomes (von Neumann and Morgenstern, 1953).”
Variational Bayesian Reinforcement Learning with Regret Bounds (2018, background): “A utility function u : R → R measures an agents preferences over outcomes [56].”
Batch Policy Learning under Constraints (2019, background): “Since L(π, λ) is linear in both λ and π, strong duality is also a consequence of von Neumann’s celebrated convexconcave minimax theorem for zero-sum games (Von Neumann & Morgenstern, 2007).”
A survey and critique of multiagent deep reinforcement learning (2018, background): “Neural Fictitious Self-Play (NFSP) [136] builds on fictitious (self-) play [49,135], together with two deep networks to find approximate Nash equilibria14 in two-player imperfect information games [341] (for example, consider Poker: when it is an agent’s turn to move it does not have access to all i”
Evolutionary game theory and multi-agent reinforcement learning (2005, background): “Originally, game theory (GT) was launched by von Neumann & Morgenstern (1944)in their book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.3 GT is an economical theory that models interactions between rational agents as games of two or more players that can choose from a set of strategies and the…”
Rethinking Formal Models of Partially Observable Multiagent Decision Making (2019, background): “The most popular game-theoretical model in these setting – extensive form games (EFG) – dates back to 1953 [30].”
The Boxer, the Wrestler, and the Coin Flip (2006, background): “[Prior probabilities and Bayesian inference can also be motivated as necessary for coherent decision making (Keynes 1921; Cox 1925; von Neumann and Morgenstern 1944) but this just shifts the problem to a requirement of coherent decision making under ignorance, which in practice might be no easier th”
Supply Chains Involving a Mean‐Variance‐Skewness‐Kurtosis Newsvendor: Analysis and Coordination (2020, unknown): “However, economists have contested its main drawback that it does not satisfy the axioms of the expected utility theory proposed by Von Neumann and Morgenstern (1953), Savage (1954), and others.”
State-Of-The-Art Review of Mathematical Optimisation Approaches for Synthesis of Energy Systems (2017, background): “Game theory is a suitable framework that mathematically models the behaviour of multiple agents with potentially conflicting interests in various domains (von Neumann and Morgenstern 1944).”
Feature Expansive Reward Learning: Rethinking Human Input (2020, background): “where the human chooses trajectories proportional to their exponentiated reward [17, 18].”
Internal critique: A logic is not a theory of reasoning and a theory of reasoning is not a logic (2002, background): “In the simplest decision to which the theory applies (e.g. von Neumann & Morgenstern, 1944), one is faced with a decision between two or more exclusive acts, each of which has various possible outcomes to which one assigns certain values or “utilities.””
Uncertainty Types and Transitions in the Entrepreneurial Process (2017, background): ““Rationality” assumes that options and outcomes are known, from which an optimal choice is made (Miller 2007; see also von Neumann and Morgenstern 1944; Savage 1954; Kahneman and Tversky 1979; Ariely 2009).”