Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.

VON NEUMANN, John & Oscar Morgenstern.

Item Number: 140960

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.

First edition of the sixtieth anniversary edition. Octavo, original cloth. Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Pamela Lewis Schnitter.

This is the classic work upon which modern-day game theory is based. What began more than sixty years ago as a modest proposal that a mathematician and an economist write a short paper together blossomed, in 1944, when Princeton University Press published Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. In it, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern conceived a groundbreaking mathematical theory of economic and social organization, based on a theory of games of strategy. Not only would this revolutionize economics, but the entirely new field of scientific inquiry it yielded--game theory--has since been widely used to analyze a host of real-world phenomena from arms races to optimal policy choices of presidential candidates, from vaccination policy to major league baseball salary negotiations. And it is today established throughout both the social sciences and a wide range of other sciences. "A rich and multifaceted work. . . . [S]ixty years later, the Theory of Games may indeed be viewed as one of the landmarks of twentieth-century social science" (Robert J. Leonard, History of Political Economics).