Game Theory Reading List

I've just finished putting the finishing touches to a course that I'm teaching with a flipped classroom approach which required me spending a fair amount of time putting together some screencasts and various other resources (the class website can be found here).

That's now done and the course is about to start. I'm more or less immediately starting to work on a course I'm teaching next academic year: a 3rd year undergraduate game theory course. I currently teach some basic game theory on our MSc course which just covers some normal form game stuff. I'm really looking forward to prepping and teaching this course.

I've actually compiled a list of 19 books but some of those I have on my kindle so here's a picture of some of the actual books:

To get started I thought I'd compile a list of books that could be of interest to the students. I have read a lot of these, flicked through some and am more or less aware of the existence of others. I thought I'd categorise some of these and might well at some part start reviewing them (similarly to my previous blog series which was ultimately inspired by +Theron Hitchman's series of posts reviewing differential geometry books). The 3 categories are:

1. Helpful books to deal with the content of the course;
2. Interesting books to delve in to further concepts from the course;
3. Other cool books.

1. Helpful books to deal with the content of the course

The course is an introductory course to game theory looking at concepts such as normal form games, evolutionary game theory and games with incomplete information. Here's the books that I feel could prove helpful to students:

- "Strategy: An introduction to Game Theory" by Joel Watson

- "Game Theory: Decisions, Interaction and Evolution" by Webb

- "An Introduction to Game Theory" by Martin Osborne

- "A brief introduction to the Basics of Game Theory" by Matthew O. Jackson

- "A primer in Game Theory" by Robert Gibbons

- "The complete idiot's guide to game theory" by Rosenthal

- "Game Theory 101: The basics" by William Spaniel

- "Essentials of Game Theory: A Concise Multidisciplinary Introduction" by Kevin Leyton Brown and Yoav Shoham

2. Interesting books to delve in to further concepts from the course

Here are some books that could be of further interest to the student, perhaps considering a certain aspect of the course in detail and/or looking in to other things:

- "Selfish routing and the price of anarchy" by +Tim Roughgarden
- "Algorithmic Game Theory" by Noam Nissan, +Tim Roughgarden, Eva Tardos and Vijay Vazirani
- "Chases and escapes" by Nahin
- "Differential Games" by Isaacs
- "The stable marriage problem: structure and algorithms" by Gusfield and Irving
- "Game Theory Evolving" by Herbert Gintis
- "Games and information: An introduction to Game Theory" by Eric Rasmusen


3. Other cool books

Here are some books that don't necessarily fit with the course but are worth a read:

- "The complexity of cooperation" by Robert Axelrod
- "Rock paper scissor: game theory in everyday life" by Fisher
- "Game Theory: A non technical introduction" by Morton Davis
- "Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour" by von Neumann and Morgenstern


If there are any books that anyone thinks I have missed off this list please let me know!