This book is a collection of essays in honor of John C. Harsanyi. Originally, we hoped that it would be ready in the year of his 70th birthday, but we did not quite succeed. It sometimes takes longer than anticipated to do things as well as one wants. I think that John Harsanyi will understand this. It is my desire to express our thanks to all those who helped to make the book possible, especially to the publishing house, the Springer Verlag. I am grateful to Hildegard Grober who assisted us in the organizational tasks connected to our editorial effort. I am deeply indebted to Horace W. Brock. His active support was extremely valuable. The results of my editorial efforts should partly be attributed to him. Reinhard Selten Table of Contents Introduction 1 I. Coopera. tive Game Theory The Consistent Shapley Value for Games without Side Payments by Michael Maschler and Guillermo Owen 5 Fictitious-Transfer Solutions in Cooperative Game Theory by Roger B. Myerson 13 The Finagle Point for Characteristic Function Games by Guillermo Owen 35 Voting by Count and Account by Bezalel Peleg 45 Fee (N)TU-Games with Incomplete Information by Joachim Rosenmftller 53 A Non-Cooperative Interpretation of Value and Potential 83 by Sergiu Hart and Andreu Mas-Colell II.
I quite enjoyed this series of essays in Game Theory. The standouts to me were P.J. Hammond, Martin Shubik, Roger Myerson, and Reinhard Selten himself. There were quite a few errors from various mathematicians earlier on in the book. I do say, it's always disheartening when I am able to show that something you've introduced into the middle of the paper is a non-equivalence (it isn't true). A couple of these papers simply assimilated the findings of various Game Theorists and others notated the difference between cardinal and ordinal utility, basically how Game Theory was founded, in contradistinction to marginal utility within economics. The axiomization of cardinal, linear utility however, was something that was introduced by Von Neumann and maintained by many others, which makes it able to study objective group and coalitional behavior. This is understood via Harsanyi, where any sort of realizations whatsoever occur when you are taking a linear utility, because in reference to some objective standard of value. So therefore, like in the original Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, Harsanyi was able to show results, with a linear tracing method, whose t value could essentially be equated as the same thing as the knowledge of the other players' parameters (hidden variables) and the structure of their stochastic behavioral function.
Mathematicians like Selten also could do this very same thing, and a good example of Selten's logic at work is his mathematical paper on the derivation of behavioral choices within 3 person, step-wise games. The findings there and elsewhere of course, pave the way for a brighter avenue of help in the future with AI and general optimal decision making for large organizations/governments.