Summary of Presh Talwalkar's The Joy of Game Theory

Book excerpt: Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview: #1 There are hundreds of gas stations around San Francisco in the California Bay Area. They are highly clustered, and this is partly due to population clustering. The phenomenon is also explained by a simple game about location competition. #2 There are two players in this game: a hot dog stand and a beach. The beach is a straight shoreline, in which customers are uniformly spread out. The beach is represented by a number line ranging from 1 at one endpoint to 1 at the other. #3 You can approach the game of business by ignoring the competition. Assume you are the only hot dog stand on a beach. Where would you want to locate. The answer is simple: any place you want. You are a monopolist, and customers will have to walk to you no matter where you are. #4 The logic behind game theory is that if either hot dog stand chooses the center point, the other will want to copy since it is better to split the market than end up on one side that yields less than half the market.