ABSTRACT
This chapter exposes the most important key concepts of game theory in a manner accessible to graduate students in electrical engineering. It examines to omit many generalizations and proofs. The chapter provides pointers to the literature on applications of game theory in signal processing and communications. Game theory is about optimization with multiple, conflicting objective functions. In conventional optimization, there is a single objective function that usually has a well-defined maximum or minimum. Finding this optimum point is then a matter of applying an appropriate numerical method. In game theory, the notion of optimality is not defined in terms of the maximum or minimum of a single cost function. Rather, the typical objective is to maximize two functions jointly, where the functions are coupled in such a way that increasing one of them necessarily means that the other must decrease. Game theory as a scientific discipline mostly evolved from work in economics during the 20th century.
