Population Games and Evolutionary Dynamics - Economic Learning & Social Evolution | Game Theory & Behavioral Economics Book for Researchers & Students

To international readers who see this review on non-U.S. Amazon: I added a few updates as comments in the U.S. Amazon (com), though a comment seems not to be share with other international Amazon websites. So, you should visit it.-------------------The manuscript of this textbook has been circulated and appreciated among game theory professionals and students. (It is deleted from his web page, and you cannot find it even in Internet Archive or Google cache.)Why do we need another textbook on evolutionary game theory? Compared to the other textbooks, the distinctive aspect of this book is that Sandholm explains all major evolutionary dynamics from "revision protocols," namely the protocol that the agents consistently follow to revise their actions. This leads us to considering more on incentive structure of games and dynamics, rather than seeing evolutionary dynamics just as peculiar kinds of differential equations. So this is really a good textbook for economists and social/behavioral scientists who want to use EGT for dynamic analysis of strategic situations. (If you are a biologist and want to know only replicator dynamic, this book may not be for you; though, you may find it interesting to put replicator in a wider class of evolutionary dynamics.)Con for this book could be that this book may be too much detailed. It spends one chapter just for population games (without dynamics); stability of Nash equilibrium is not explained simply and involves many variations of stability, as the "extent" of Nash stability is actually varied with dynamics and games and we have to be careful about the difference. So this book is for a serious learner. Not for glancing or for reading on train. Actually each chapter is coupled with a good mathematical "appendix" (though it is like another chapter) and contains many exercise questions. So you can really use this as a textbook, or to learn evolutionary game theory by yourself.Sandholm had postponed the publication of this book again and again. (So you might have seen many game theorists cite this book as published in 2009 or some). It would be because he wanted to include very recent findings and new research projects in the whole EGT world. He finally published it in the winter of 2010/11, and actually he cites many up-to-date papers (not only of himself). Does it mean that he found the progress of EGT being close to a limit point? I hope not, as this book is not just a monograph of finished research projects but (literally) an introduction for new future researchers in EGT.The book contains a lot of color pictures; the book won't be as heavy as you might imagine for a over-600-page book; the cover is cool for EGT geeks who would love congestion as application of EGT. Worth to buy a hardcopy at this low regular price, even if you had the pdf file of the manuscript. (And, you'll be surprised how much Sandholm revised it from the circulated manuscript.)