ABSTRACT
A mathematician with many scientific contributions , von Neumann had developed some of the central mathematical ideas of the theory of games. Among the most basic contributions of von Neumann and Morgenstern was their reconceptualization of the nature of utility. The concept had been widely used for many years by economists, who recognized that the real desirability of an outcome was not to be equated with its monetary value. Von Neumann and Morgenstern use the idea of a lottery to move from a rank ordering of preferences to interval measures of utility. By the early 1980s, however, publication of experimental gaming studies had become less attractive to journal editors. Game theory models as tools for experimental research had lost some of their popularity even as they were becoming used in a more theoretically sophisticated fashion, as can be seen in those examples which still find their way into publication.
