The Theory of Extensive Form Games

Book_CAF_KRTogether with my most-frequent coauthor Klaus Ritzberger, I have been working on the formal-analytical foundations of extensive form games for over 15 years now. Last year, we made a (considerable) effort and reorganized our published research on this topic. The result is a book, of course called The Theory of Extensive Form Games, published by Springer Verlag as part of the official series of the Game Theory Society, which was presented at the recent World Conference in Maastricht (2016).

If you know anything about how the academic world works, you might be wondering “Why would a researcher write a book?” Indeed. We serious academics get zero credit for books, since the only milestones in our careers are peer-reviewed research articles (caveat: I am speaking about social and natural sciences here). So investing time in writing books is, in terms of opportunity costs, a bad decision. And the target audience are other researchers and advanced grad students, so it’s not like we will make any serious money out of that (Springer recently sent us the data for 2016: we sold around a 100 copies, which is more than I expected). So why did we do it? Continue reading