This is Dixit and Nalebuff's updated and reorganised version of Thinking Strategically, covering the same material with new examples and additional topics. It presents game theory for readers without mathematics.
The content covers backward induction in sequential games, dominant strategies and equilibrium in simultaneous games, the prisoner's dilemma and the mechanisms that sustain cooperation, commitment and credibility with the full catalogue of devices that make a threat or promise believable, mixed strategies and the value of unpredictability, brinkmanship, and information problems including signalling and screening.
The additions relative to the 1991 book include more material on auctions, on incentive design and mechanism design, on voting rules and their manipulation, and on bargaining. The examples are updated with material from business negotiations, sports, television game shows and political contests. The chapter on how to use a game show format to illustrate strategic reasoning is genuinely instructive.
The book works as either a first introduction or as a refresher, and it is more accessible than most formal treatments. Its limitations are the same as its predecessor's: it teaches recognition of strategic structures rather than the ability to model a real situation, and the confidence with which game theoretic reasoning is applied to business and political situations exceeds what its predictive record supports. Readers who have read Thinking Strategically will find substantial overlap and should treat this as a replacement rather than a companion.
Operators and negotiators wanting practical strategic reasoning without mathematics, as a replacement for rather than companion to Thinking Strategically.
Chosen by shared topics, the entries that hold them, and the people who recommended both.