Two Person Cooperative Games WITH The theory of play and integral equations with skew symmetric kernels, On games that involve chance and the skill of players, and On systems of linear skew-symmetric determinant and the genera theory of play in Econometrica 21, January 1953, pp. 128-141 and pp. 97-118 de Nash, John Forbes with Borel, Emile - 1953

Baltimore: Waverley Press, 1953. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL PAPER WRAPS of John Nash's fourth and final paper seminal contribution to mathematics and non-cooperative game theory.

In his 1950 paper on the subject, "Nash presented a bargaining solution that was completely unanticipated in the literature. Breaking with the past, he used a simple yet path-breaking axiomatic approach and a non-cooperative model of games to derive a bargaining solution between two rational persons. This axiomatic approach aimed to identify the common characteristics of bargaining and its solutions rather than describe the processes involved in bargaining" (Berckert, International Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology, 22).

This 1953 paper by Nash set a new entire research agenda that has been referred to as the Nash Program for cooperative games. In the Nash Program, "although players MAY enter into a binding agreement, they need not. If they choose not to, then there is a non-cooperative game in which each player can, adopting the appropriate mixed strategy, be assured of a certain minimum expected payoff; call this outcome the 'disagreement point.' The original cooperative game can thus be conceived as a bargaining problem in which players seek to improve their situation by moving away from the disagreement point to a new, more desirable point conferring greater utility. Exactly which point is selected depends upon the particular arbitration scheme used. An arbitration scheme can be thought of as a function mapping the set of possible outcomes to a single outcome: the solution offered by the arbitrator.

A cooperative game, then, can be conceived as an extensive form of a non-cooperative game where the early stages of the game involve the selection of the disagreement point and the arbitration scheme. This approach, of reducing cooperative games to non-cooperative games, is known as the "Nash Program" (The Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia, Volume 1, 328). In 1994 Nash shared the Nobel Prize in Economics with Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi "for their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games" (Nobel Prize Committee).

NOTE: This issue also contains English translations of Emile Borel's three papers on game theory. CONDITION & DETAILS: 4to. 10 X 7 inches (250 x 175mm). Single issue in original wraps in fine condition.