Teoria dei giochi. Battigalli, Pierpaolo

Author:Battigalli, Pierpaolo. Introduction of Giacomo Bonanno

Every day of our life we are forced to make thousands of decisions, some minimal and apparently irrelevant, others which may alter our relationships, careers, turning points and futures. Making a choice is developing a strategy, giving shape to a calculation. In what circumstances is it permissible to say that a particular choice is "rational"? To answer this question, game theory can help us. Pierpaolo Battigalli describes its founding mathematical concepts and unfolds its history from the seventeenth century. That was the century when this discipline emerged, starting from a correspondence between Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat, and developing until today’s economic and financial implications. Indeed, because the analysis of strategic reasoning can, for example, make it possible to make predictions concerning the outcome of social interactions or questions of institutional planning. In other words, reading these pages reveals to us how decisions determine and are determined, and how they depend on us as much as we depend on them.