ABSTRACT
As previous chapters have shown, writers before von Neumann and Morgenstern’s epochal 1944 publication did a good deal of work on the analysis of strategic interdependence-the stuff of game theory. While economists such as Stackelberg (see Chapter 3) gave considerable thought to the nature of equilibrium in such situations, relatively little formal work on the definition and existence of equilibrium for games in general was written before 1944, among the most important of which was von Neumann (1928a, b). Most writers employed a notion of equilibrium ‘natural’ to the situation modelled. Strategic games, whose outcome depends on the skill of the participants in choosing a strategy of play, received widespread attention among mathematicians and economists only with the publication in 1944 of the first edition of von Neumann and Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. The book marked an important advance, but it built upon an existing literature on strategic games, to which both its authors had contributed.
