The Foundations of Game Theory, Volumes 3

The Purpose of This Collection
This anthology gathers together primary sources on the development of game theory - the analysis of conflict and cooperation as games of strategy - from its beginnings until 1960.
The primary sources collected here serve as a companion work to Volume I of our History of Game Theory entitled From the Beginnings to 1945 (Routledge, 1996) and the as-yet unwritten second volume, as well as to recent work on the history of game theory by other scholars, notably Robert J. Leonard and Christian Schmidt. It also serves as a convenient repository of primary sources for those fascinated by accounts of early work in Luce and
Raiffa (1957) and Shubik (1982). Such early contributors as Edgeworth, Richardson and Lanchester were not aware that their writings were later to become known as game theory, which came to be recognized as a distinct field only in 1944 with the publication of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Only in retrospect were their close links to later developments recognized, whereupon Edgeworth I market games, Richardson process models of the arms race and Lanchester games took their place in the literature of game theory. By 1960, after the fourth and last volume of Contributions to the Theory of Games had appeared in the Annals of MatJtematics Studies, game theory was established as a recognized specialization in mathematics and economics, with promising applications in fields ranging from political science to biology. Within another 20 or so years, game theory had transformed both microeconomic theory and industrial organization.
This collection brings together pioneering works on strategic choice, interaction and games previously scattered in very diverse sources. In some cases these works have been difficult to find. Lewis Fry Richardson's later articles on models of arms races appeared in Nature from the 1930s, and his later work is well known in two volumes published posthumously in 1960. However, his path-breaking 1919 pamphlet on the Mathematical Psychology of War - the basis of his later expositions - has until now been available in British copyright libraries and almost nowhere else (reprinted as Chapter 8 in Volume I: hereafter (I: 8». Jean Ville's 1938 nontopological proof of the minimax theorem has been cited ever since it served as the basis for the proof of the minimax theorem in von Neumann and Morgenstern (1944) - but how many game theorists have ever seen a copy of it, or indeed of Rene de Possel's 1936 pamphlet (I: 24 and 23)? Laszlo Kalmar's 1929 article has been translated by Julia Zantke for this anthology (I: 20). The early RAND Corporation memoranda by Lloyd Shapley and Rufus Isaacs made significant contributions to advancing game theory, but again have never been widely available (II: 19, 28-31)…