ABSTRACT
John Von Neumann’s and Oskar Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (TGEB) (1944) made great advances in the analysis of strategic games and in the axiomatization of measurable utility theory, and drew the attention of economists and other social scientists to these subjects. In the interwar period, several papers and monographs on strategic games had been published, including work by Von Neumann (1928) and Morgenstern (1935) as well as by Émile Borel (1921, 1924, 1927, 1938), Jean Ville (1938), René de Possel (1936), and Hugo Steinhaus (1925), but these were known only to a small community of Continental European mathematicians. Von Neumann and Morgenstern thrust strategic games above the horizon of the economics profession. Their work was the basis for postwar research in game theory, initially as a specialized field with applications to military strategy and statistical decision theory, but eventually permeating industrial organization and public choice and influencing macroeconomics and international trade.
