In this pithy and highly readable book, Brian Skyrms, a recognised authority on game and decision theory, investigates traditional problems of the social contract in terms of evolutionary dynamics. Game theory is skilfully employed to offer new interpretations of a wide variety of social phenomena, including justice, mutual aid, commitment, convention and meaning. The author eschews any grand, unified theory. Rather, he presents the reader with tools drawn from evolutionary game theory for the purpose of analysing and coming to understand (...) the social contract. The book is not technical and requires no special background knowledge. As such, it could be enjoyed by students and professionals in a wide range of disciplines: political science, philosophy, decision theory, economics and biology. (shrink)

This book discusses the main shortcomings of the classical solution concept from noncooperative game theory and provides a comprehensive study of the more refined concepts that have been introduced to overcome these drawbacks. The plausibility of the assumptions underlying each such concept are discussed, desirable properties as well as deficiencies are illustrated, characterizations are derived and the relationships between the various concepts are studied. The first six chapters provide an informal discussion with many examples as well as a comprehensive overview (...) for normal form games. The remaining chapters are devoted to specific applications, illustrating the strength of the various concepts. (shrink)