Status: read in Czech

Games are everywhere: Drivers maneuvering in heavy traffic are playing a driving game. Bargain hunters bidding on eBay are playing an auctioning game. The supermarket's price for corn flakes is decided by playing an economic game. This Very Short Introduction offers a succinct tour of the fascinating world of game theory, a ground-breaking field that analyzes how to play games in a rational way. Ken Binmore, a renowned game theorist, explains the theory in a way that is both entertaining and non-mathematical yet also deeply insightful, revealing how game theory can shed light on everything from social gatherings, to ethical decision-making, to successful card-playing strategies, to calculating the sex ratio among bees. With mini-biographies of many fascinating, and occasionally eccentric, founders of the subject – including John Nash, subject of the movie A Beautiful Mind – this book offers a concise overview of a cutting-edge field that has seen spectacular successes in evolutionary biology and economics, and is beginning to revolutionize other disciplines from psychology to political science.

Rating: I've been looking forward to this book for quite some time, but unfortunately it's disappointed my expectations. Although the abstract talks about it being engagingly written, it didn't come to me. In the book, the various games that game theory works with are described quite intricately, but everything is desribed as sliding only on the surface, with no deeper explanation of what this means in real terms (the introduction, though? Probably nah.). Many things are described in the book in a very theoretical way, with the reader having to understand and know in advance much more than what is being talked about. The language of the work often seemed unintelligible to me (is it just a translation to the Czech or is that the problem of the English original as well?), many passages were dull. I'm sorry, because game theory certainly can and should offer more, but I wouldn't recommend this book.