The survival game : how game theory explains the biology of human cooperation and competition

"An accessible, intriguing explanation of game theory . . . that can help explain much human behavior." -Seattle Post-Intelligencer Humans, like bacteria, woodchucks, chimpanzees, and other animals, compete or cooperate in order to get food, shelter, territory, and other resources to survive. But how do they decide whether to muscle out or team up with the competition? In The Survival Game , David P. Barash synthesizes the newest ideas from psychology, economics, and biology to explore and explain the roots of human strategy. Drawing on game theory-the study of how individuals make decisions-he explores the give-and-take of spouses in determining an evening's plans, the behavior of investors in a market bubble, and the maneuvers of generals on a battlefield alongside the mating and fighting strategies of "less rational" animals. Ultimately, Barash's lively and clear examples shed light on what makes our decisions human, and what we can glean from game theory and the natural world as we negotiate and compete every day.

From a zoologist and psychologist, an astonishing look at the biological and strategic roots of human decisions

Humans, like bacteria, woodchucks, chimpanzees, and other animals, compete or cooperate in order to get food, shelter, territory, and other resources to survive. But how do they decide whether to muscle out or team up with the competition?

In The Survival Game, David P. Barash synthesizes the newest ideas from psychology, economics, and biology to explore and explain the roots of human strategy. Drawing on game theory-the study of how individuals make decisions-he explores the give-and-take of spouses in determining an evening's plans, the behavior of investors in a market bubble, and the maneuvers of generals on a battlefield alongside the mating and fighting strategies of "less rational" animals. Ultimately, Barash's lively and clear examples shed light on what makes our decisions human, and what we can glean from game theory and the natural world as we negotiate and compete every day.

Publishers Weekly

Game theory attempts to explain the dynamics of life as a series of individual games, each involving specific moves that take place within a strictly delineated set of rules. Depending on whom you ask, it's either a brilliant tool for analyzing the complexities of social life or hopelessly reductionist. Zoologist and professor of psychology Barash (coauthor of The Myth of Monogamy), who emphatically falls into the former camp, proves an apt popularizer of the basics of the field, and his book reads like an introductory seminar led by a friendly professor with a slightly corny sense of humor. Readers who have never heard of the Prisoner's Dilemma or the Game of Chicken will find Barash's explanations accessible, while those who are already familiar with the basics of game theory can appreciate the wealth of historical, biological and hypothetical cases to which he applies its methods, ranging from the Bush administration's foreign policy in the spring of 2003 to the behavior of sponge-dwelling isopods in the Gulf of California. Though persuasive, game theory as laid out here and in other works (the best known being Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene) can often seem harshly rational in its cold calculations of life and death, and Barash himself writes in his conclusion, "[F]or a long time I have really loved game theory, and, for about as long, I've hated it." By the end of this highly readable introduction, readers will understand quite well what he means. (Dec.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

In The Survival Game, David P. Barash synthesizes the newest ideas from the exciting world of game theory - an amalgam of logic, psychology, economics, and biology - to explore and explain why people make the decisions they do: the give-and-take of spouses in determining an evening's plans, the behavior of investors in a market bubble, the maneuvers of generals on a battlefield, all of which are remarkably similar to the mating and fighting strategies of "less rational" animals. Barash describes the classic Prisoner's Dilemma of game theory, in which a decision can carry a heavy price when there's no way to know if your partner will stick with you or look out for his own interests, and finds that an RNA virus behaves by the same rules. In the Hawk-Dove Game, he looks at how players change their strategies - to be either aggressive or yielding - when a third person enters the picture, and draws analogies to the territorial battles among speckled wood butterflies. And notorious strategies arising from the Game of Chicken, tit-for-tat, and follow the leader turn up in examples as disparate as World War II's submarine war and the mating antics of the yellow dung fly "An accessible, intriguing explanation of game theory . . . that can help explain much human behavior." -Seattle Post-Intelligencer Humans, like bacteria, woodchucks, chimpanzees, and other animals, compete or cooperate in order to get food, shelter, territory, and other resources to survive. But how do they decide whether to muscle out or team up with the competition?In __The Survival Game__, David P. Barash synthesizes the newest ideas from psychology, economics, and biology to explore and explain the roots of human strategy. Drawing on game theory-the study of how individuals make decisions-he explores the give-and-take of spouses in determining an evening's plans, the behavior of investors in a market bubble, and the maneuvers of generals on a battlefield alongside the mating and fighting strategies of "less rational" animals. Ultimately, Barash's lively and clear examples shed light on what makes our decisions human, and what we can glean from game theory and the natural world as we negotiate and compete every day. Barash synthesizes the newest ideas from psychology, economics, and biology to explore the roots of human strategy. Drawing on game theory -- the study of how individuals make decisions -- he delves into the give-and-take of scheduling plans with a spouse and the maneuvers of an arms race alongside the strategies of "less rational" animals. He explains the classice Hawk-Dove stand-off, where people opt to be aggressive or yielding, and draws analogies to the territorial battles of speckled wood butterfiles. The Prisoner's Dilemma, the Game of Chicken, and Follow the Leader turn up in examples as disparate as investor's picks in a market bubble and the mating antics of the yellow dung fly. Barash ultimately sheds light on what makes our decisions human, and what we can glean from game theory and the natural world as we negotiate and compete with others in our daily lives. - BOOK JACKET A zoologist and psychologist delves deeply into the biological explanation for the root cause of human decision-making and discovers survival strategies that have been lurking in the genes since the dawn of the species. In Moliere's play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Monsieur Jourdain is astonished to learn that all of his life, without knowing it, he has been speaking prose.