Average customer rating:
- This book is not about learning but the application of nonlinear dynamics
- Learning Learning in Games
- Good book
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The Theory of Learning in Games (Economic Learning and Social Evolution)
Drew Fudenberg , and
David K. Levine
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Evolutionary Game Theory
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Repeated Games and Reputations: Long-Run Relationships
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A Course in Game Theory
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Auction Theory
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Contract Theory
ASIN: 0262061945 |
Book Description
In economics, most noncooperative game theory has focused on equilibrium in games, especially Nash equilibrium and its refinements. The traditional explanation for when and why equilibrium arises is that it results from analysis and introspection by the players in a situation where the rules of the game, the rationality of the players, and the players' payoff functions are all common knowledge. Both conceptually and empirically, this theory has many problems.
In The Theory of Learning in Games Drew Fudenberg and David Levine develop an alternative explanation that equilibrium arises as the long-run outcome of a process in which less than fully rational players grope for optimality over time. The models they explore provide a foundation for equilibrium theory and suggest useful ways for economists to evaluate and modify traditional equilibrium concepts.
Customer Reviews:
This book is not about learning but the application of nonlinear dynamics.......2005-09-02
This book does not provide valuable information about learning systems. It demonstrates, that nonlinear dynamics can be used to describe a subclass of learning. I personally doubt, that this subclass is of great interest, because it neglects completely heuristic strategies in game playing. Besides this, nonlinear dynamics is only useful if the number of parameter of the system is small. I doubt, that these toy examples are sufficient to describe reality, e.g., economics.
Moreover, the organization of the book and the style it is written in, is in my view not favorable.
I guess, this book is for a very small readership that does not have to worry about the correspondence of a model with nature. But also from this perspective it can not be recommended, because it is not written well. Both thumbs down!
Learning Learning in Games.......2003-01-28
An excellent treatise on some important work in the theory of learning in games. Fudenberg and Levine provide a good coverage of standard myopic play dynamics with a special emphasis on ficticious play and replicator dynamics. I particularly liked the sections going through the Kandori, Mailath and Rob (1993) model as well as Young (1993) on the evolution of convention.
The treatments of dynamic systems analysis, elementary game theory, stochastic approximation theory, etc., are necessarily short. The appendices do not suffice for a reader without a reasonable background.
Nonetheless an essential read for anybody doing serious work in learning, or wanting to know what all the fuss is about.
Good book.......2000-07-27
During the work on my master thesis ("Learning in strategic games") i bought several books about the topic. This is the one of them. Chapters 1 and 2 (Introduction, Fictitious Play) are really good introduction into the subject. The following chapters evolve the theory further giving some good ideas for practical implementation (I was writing a C program which had to be able to play the game and to learn). I would recommend this book to anyone interested in relatively new field - Learning in games.
Book Description
This volume brings together all of Ken Binmore's influential experimental papers on bargaining along with newly written commentary in which Binmore discusses the underlying game theory and addresses the criticism leveled at it by behavioral economists.
When Binmore began his experimental work in the 1980s, conventional wisdom held that game theory would not work in the laboratory, but Binmore and other pioneers established that game theory can often predict the behavior of experienced players very well in favorable laboratory settings. The case of human bargaining behavior is particularly challenging for game theory. Everyone agrees that human behavior in real-life bargaining situations is governed at least partly by considerations of fairness, but what happens in a laboratory when such fairness considerations supposedly conflict with game-theoretic predictions? Behavioral economists, who emphasize the importance of other-regarding or social preferences, sometimes argue that their findings threaten traditional game theory. Binmore disputes both their interpretations of their findings and their claims about what game theorists think it reasonable to predict.
Binmore's findings from two decades of game theory experiments have made a lasting contribution to economics. These papers--some coauthored with other leading economists, including Larry Samuelson, Avner Shaked, and John Sutton--show that game theory does indeed work in favorable laboratory environments, even in the challenging case of bargaining.
Customer Reviews:
Game Theory Works, but Not Always Binmore's Way.......2007-07-12
Ken Binmore is the Renaissance Man of game theory, combining a strong analytical presence and an excellent record of empirical research with a deep appreciation for the social role of game theory and its relationship to evolutionary biology, anthropology, and philosophy. "Does game theory work?' is mainly a compilation of his bargaining experiments, but it includes an new introduction explaining the issues behind the title of the book and offering an answer to the question.
The main issue behind the question is the body of experimental results that show that individuals often behave in ways not predicted by classical game theory. This body of data includes the investigation of logic and decision-making by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and his coworkers on Bayesian rationality and the more recent body of experiments on strategic interaction in social dilemmas.
I agree with Binmore's answer, which is that game theory does work, but I think he is wrong and/or misleading in many of the points he makes in the books introductory chapter. For a broader treatment of these issues, see Herbert Gintis, "Behavioral Ethics Meets Natural Justice", Politics, Philosophy and Economics 5,1 (2006):5-32. Since I am one of the "behavioral economists" who comes into criticism in this chapter, I shall begin by stating my own views. Classical game theory holds that rational actors are self-regarding in the sense that they care only about their own material payoff in games, and they will play in ways that implement Nash equilibria. I think the evidence overwhelmingly supports this prediction in market-like interactions in which individuals cannot affect the behavior of others through strategic interaction. Indeed, Vernon Smith received the Nobel prize in economics largely for showing that this is the case. However, when individuals come into direct, personal, strategic interaction, the classical predictions fail. This is not in the first instance because there is any problem with game theory, but rather because the self-regarding model of human preferences is incorrect. Rather, people care about fairness, honesty, trustworthiness, and are strong reciprocators in the sense that they prefer to return kindness for kindness and unkindness for unkindness, even when this is personally costly in material terms.
Binmore's position, by contrast, is that there is nothing wrong with the neoclassical model of the individual as a largely selfish maximizer of personal material gain, and the apparent value of fairness, reciprocity, and ethical virtue exhibited in experimental settings arise because either the monetary stakes are very low, or the game is so complex that individual deploy behaviors from every-day life in which these values help a selfish individual to establish and maintain a reputation that is selfishly maximizing in the long run, or individuals simply haven't had enough time to learn how to behave selfishly. I think each of these arguments is incorrect.
First, does the fact that when the monetary stakes increase people behave more selfishly contradict the other-regarding preferences model? Not at all. A simple application of the economist's rational actor model shows that unless one cares infinitely about the non-monetary payoffs, when the when the monetary rewards to a selfish behavior increase and the non-monetary rewards for unselfish behavior are held constant, behavior will shift towards the selfish behavior. For instance, suppose a fraction f(p) of subjects are willing to sacrifice an amount of money p to behave honestly. Then, as p increases, we expect f to fall; i.e. the higher the cost of being honest, the lower the fraction of the subject pool who will act honestly.
Second, it is true, as Binmore stresses, that in many experimental games, subjects begin by playing unselfishly but when the game is repeated many times, they end up behaving selfishly. Binmore interprets this as "learning to play the game," so the original behavior is not altruistic, but simply mistaken. For instance, in the public goods game, subjects begin by contributing more than half their income to the public pool, but after ten rounds, they contribute almost nothing. Is this because they learned how to play? Not at all. It is because some players do not contribute, and contributors feel cheated and respond by not contributing themselves. We know that this is the correct explanation because if we restart the game with experienced subjects, the same people who contributed nothing at the end of the last series of tries, begin by contributing at their original level (Andreoni, Journal of Pubic Economics, 1988).
Binmore's final argument, that acts of altruism and kindness demonstrated in the laboratory are due to subjects' mistaking the one-shot anonymity of the laboratory for the repeated game, reputation-formation environment of everyday life, is equally without foundation. The most important indication of this is that in fact we experience many one-shot anonymous encounters in everyday life, and people are quite capable of telling the difference between such events and the recurrent ones we share with family, friends, and coworkers. The idea that anonymous one-shots are rare and we are unaccustomed to dealing with them is not plausible.
Binmore believes that repeated game theory's Folk Theorem is sufficient to explain human cooperation, and other-regarding preferences are just a small wrinkle in human behavior. This is bizarre coming from Binmore, who stresses throughout that people only learn to play simple games, whereas the Nash equilibria implemented by the Folk Theorem are horribly complex and depend on highly implausible constructs, such as individuals actually playing mixed strategies, signals been public, a mechanism existing to choose among the continuum of equilibria available, and some dynamical mechanism by which behavior is coordinated and stabilized. For groups of more than five or six agents, the Folk Theorem is a poor model of behavior indeed, and has no empirical support.
Binmore stresses that social institutions choose efficient equilibria from among the myriad Nash equilibria envisioned by the Folk Theorem, but there is no analytical model that supports this assertion. Indeed, as Aumann (1987) has shown, under many plausible conditions the natural equilibrium concept for game theory is the correlated equilibrium, which is highly amenable to instantiation through social institutions. However, it is a long distance from this plausible notion to the idea that human cooperation is based in the main on selfishness, and the other-regarding preferences and ethical proclivities of humans is just a little icing on the cake. My own view is that human society is predicated on our predisposition to behave ethically, and a society of selfish sociopaths, however patient and however enlightened to their own self-interest, would offers lives that are overarchingly nasty, brutish and short.
Book Description
This important new text and reference for researchers and students in machine learning, game theory, statistics and information theory offers the first comprehensive treatment of the problem of predicting individual sequences. Unlike standard statistical approaches to forecasting, prediction of individual sequences does not impose any probabilistic assumption on the data-generating mechanism. Yet, prediction algorithms can be constructed that work well for all possible sequences, in the sense that their performance is always nearly as good as the best forecasting strategy in a given reference class. The central theme is the model of prediction using expert advice, a general framework within which many related problems can be cast and discussed. Repeated game playing, adaptive data compression, sequential investment in the stock market, sequential pattern analysis, and several other problems are viewed as instances of the experts' framework and analyzed from a common nonstochastic standpoint that often reveals new and intriguing connections. Old and new forecasting methods are described in a mathematically precise way in order to characterize their theoretical limitations and possibilities.
Book Description
Games provide meaningful and enjoyable language practice at all levels and for all age groups. They can be used to practise any of the skills - speaking, listening, reading and writing - at any stage of the learning process, from controlled repetition through guided practice to free expression. To enable teachers to select the activities most suitable for their needs, precise information is provided, both at the beginning of each game and in the summary chart, about the language content, the skills to be practised, the level, the degree of teacher-control, and the time and materials required. Clear advice is given on preparation and classroom procedure, with many illustrations and examples. There is a comprehensive index.
Customer Reviews:
Very good resource book.......2007-10-06
This is a very good resource book for your ESL classes. The games were easily adapted to our specific needs and I'm glad that I purchased it.
Games for Language Learning.......2007-08-24
It's an excellent educational resource for teaching ESL. I recommend it. My students have enjoy the games I have done with them the first few days of class.
wonderful resource.......2007-03-10
What a great resource this book is. I will definitely consult it often. Games for anything and everything.
Useful.......2004-05-13
This is an invaluable resource for language teachers. As any classroom teacher knows, games often add life to a class that is about to fall asleep. They add energy to a class and give the students a little burst of motivation. This book covers a wide variety of games for teaching English as a second language. The games are divided into discrete categories. For example some of the categories are psychological games, magic tricks, story games, and memory games. Since the games are divided in this way, it becomes easy to find the game that will suit your classroom goals. I've used the ideas in this book many times in my classes and they work well.
Customer Reviews:
A Fun Way to Learn French.......2005-02-18
My kids (ages 2, 4, and 6) enjoy listening to this tape on the way to school. They also enjoy playing the games that are suggested, so we frequently have to stop the tape.
This is a good introduction to some basic French words.
Good buy.......2003-12-29
I have a 2 year old girl who likes to sing. She seems to really like this tape. She has a tape player she carys around and also listens to it in the car. All the songs are in French only with an introduction in English. All the words and translation are in the booklet that comes with it. Overall it is worth the money.
Average customer rating:
- A MUST have!!
- Learning and Coordination: Inductive Deliberation, Equilibri
- The most amazing book on this subject I've ever read!
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Learning and Coordination: Inductive Deliberation, Equilibrium and Convention (Studies in Ethics (New York, N.Y.).)
P Vanderschraaf
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Rationality and Coordination (Cambridge Studies in Probability, Induction and Decision Theory)
ASIN: 0815340397 |
Book Description
Vanderschraaf develops a new theory of game theory equilibrium selection in this book. The new theory defends general correlated equilibrium concepts and suggests a new analysis of convention.
Customer Reviews:
A MUST have!!.......2001-07-22
I laughed, I cried, I bought three copies. This is one of the most enlightening book you will ever read, please buy as many copies as you can. I have to say he is one of the greatest future brother in laws I can ask for. Great job Pete!
Learning and Coordination: Inductive Deliberation, Equilibri.......2001-04-25
The author does a great job at making the subject matter clear and understandable. I highly recommend this book.
The most amazing book on this subject I've ever read!.......2001-04-21
Wow! I can't beleive it. Dr. Vanderschraaf really gets your attention and never lets go throughout the entire book. What a page turner!! I just know that I won't be able to just read this one just once. It's really amazing, and you won't believe the ending! I don't want to spoil it, but be prepared for a major surprise. Kudos to this fine author! He really takes the subject and delivers it to the common reader. Great read!
Book Description
Moral Sentiments and Material Interests presents an innovative synthesis of research in different disciplines to argue that cooperation stems not from the stereotypical selfish agent acting out of disguised self-interest but from the presence of "strong reciprocators" in a social group.
Presenting an overview of research in economics, anthropology, evolutionary and human biology, social psychology, and sociology, the book deals with both the theoretical foundations and the policy implications of this explanation for cooperation. Chapter authors in the remaining parts of the book discuss the behavioral ecology of cooperation in humans and nonhuman primates, modeling and testing strong reciprocity in economic scenarios, and reciprocity and social policy. The evidence for strong reciprocity in the book includes experiments using the famous Ultimatum Game (in which two players must agree on how to split a certain amount of money or they both get nothing.)
Customer Reviews:
Well written, easy to read, informative.......2007-09-19
Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life (Economic Learning and Social Evolution) combinds the theory of cultural evolution ala Boyd and Richerson (and Henrich et al) and the behavioral economy by people like Gintis, Bowles and Fehr. The book works further based on the theory - develops e.g. models for a better social policy etc.
Book discusses an issue which is very central for "being a human being" - co-operation. Book is very informative, very well written even if there are many writers with heterogenous background. Also after the book you kind of get more optimistic about the prospects of humananity.
I am without any formal education in antropology, biology and economics but have read "everything" by Boyd and Richerson - my understanding on economics is based on Microeconomics by Samuel Bowles.
The book was to me a good further reading after the Bowles Microeconomics book. But the book can be read even by someone who does not know about economics even that much as me. The book is not too formal - easy to read actually.
An eclectic collection of great essays.......2007-06-08
This book is just really great. The literature on fairness and reciprocity in social science is growing fast, and this book is ideal to give you a flavour of why this is such a good thing. It is diverse, with entries ranging from biological models that attempt to explain the evolution of reciprocity, through the implications of reciprocity for the way legal sanctions work, to the political philosophy of the dark side of clan mentality.
Most readers will probably not want to read everything, and even less people will agree with everything. One needs to remember that a lot of the stuff in this book is still controversial, including the existence of (strong) reciprocity, but this is what makes it so very interesting. And if only half of what's in this book is right, it is still revolutionary.
In 10 years, this book will be terribly outdated. But for now, it is the best thing you can get if you are interested in the interplay between evolution, reciprocity and social order, and the fundamental questions of social science that it entails.
Fairness and Sociability.......2006-05-08
For several years now, a group of social scientists has been studying the human tendency to be socially fair rather than narrowly selfish. The editors of this volume--Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd, and Ernst Fehr--are among the stalwarts; others are found among the authors of the book's chapters.
The core of this long-running effort is Fehr's experiments with the ultimatum game, in which two people must share a sum of money (say, $10); Person A gets to propose a split, Person B can only accept or decline. Economists and politicians would expect every game to wind up with a $9.99/$0.01 split (or actually a 9-1 split, since bills are used), but in fact typical splits are more like 5-5 or 6-4, and in one place (Lamalera, Indonesia) people actually split something like 4-6, few A's ever claiming even half the money. This long-running set of experiments around the world adds to a vast, rapidly accumulating set of data showing that people are sociable, not "rational" in the folk-economic sense (i.e., dedicated solely to narrow material self-interest). The present book discusses the implications for economics and politics. If people are naturally concerned with fairness, narrowly economistic policies can be counterproductive; we all know cases of "crowding out," in which a material incentive actually makes people act worse, by crowding out moral incentives. If you reward people for being good, they will think it's all a cynical game, and will act worse. Punitive legislation to make people do what they do anyway (for moral reasons) is also counterproductive. Imagine what these realizations would do to American social policy.
The problem with this book is that it is too optimistic and upbeat. The downside of human sociability is confined to one page, late in the book (p. 388), where racism, honor killing, and the like get a quick mention. Alas, the morning radio brings a stream of accounts not only of such things but also of religious butchery all over the world--Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and even Buddhists (theoretically prohibited from killing but busily genocidal). This brings us back to Adam Smith's suggestion that greed may not be lovable but may be better than the noble, virtuous alternatives. I hope Gintis et al work on how to decouple fairness and interpersonal concern from the desire to exterminate everybody who is not in one's immediate social set. Until this is done, the hope purveyed in this work will remain thin.
The authors note that humans seem genetically programmed to have at least some sense of fairness and of self-sacrifice for the common good, but they wisely refrain from trying to unpack "hereditary" and "environmental" or "cultural" aspects. Heredity makes us do this, and learn it easily, and heredity gives us the ability to learn and develop cultures. No way to unpack. Still, more needs to be done on just how flexible these inborn moralities are. The range from Lamalera to certain parts of South America is pretty great. So is the range of murderousness in religious and ethnic settings. We need to know how to modify human behavior in these regards, and how much we can hope for.
That being said, this book is the best yet in the long list of books that devastate the selfish-individualist model of human behavior. People desperately want to be sociable, and be good members of their society. This may lead them to fairness and generosity, or to body-piercing, or to suicide bombing. This book offers hope for building new societies through use of innate human decency. At this point in time, any book seriously offering such hope is desirable.
Average customer rating:
- Important Contribution to Political Philosophy
- Upgrading Rawls' "Theory of Justice"
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Game Theory and the Social Contract, Vol. 2: Just Playing (Economic Learning and Social Evolution)
Ken Binmore
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
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Game Theory and the Social Contract, Vol. 1: Playing Fair
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Natural Justice
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Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life (Economic Learning and Social Evolution)
ASIN: 0262024446 |
Book Description
In Volume 1 of Game Theory and the Social Contract, Ken Binmore restated the problems of moral and political philosophy in the language of game theory. In Volume 2, Just Playing, he unveils his own controversial theory, which abandons the metaphysics of Immanuel Kant for the naturalistic approach to morality of David Hume. According to this viewpoint, a fairness norm is a convention that evolved to coordinate behavior on an equilibrium of a society's Game of Life. This approach allows Binmore to mount an evolutionary defense of Rawls's original position that escapes the utilitarian conclusions that follow when orthodox reasoning is applied with the traditional assumptions. Using ideas borrowed from the theory of bargaining and repeated games, Binmore is led instead to a form of egalitarianism that vindicates the intuitions that led Rawls to write his Theory of Justice.
Written for an interdisciplinary audience, Just Playing offers a panoramic tour through a range of new and disturbing insights that game theory brings to anthropology, biology, economics, philosophy, and psychology. It is essential reading for anyone who thinks it likely that ethics evolved along with the human species.
Customer Reviews:
Important Contribution to Political Philosophy.......2001-02-13
Binmore treats ethics not as a system of rules justified by Reason, but as by contrast, ethics the scientific study of how humans behave and think. Binmore reports extensively on contemporary ethnographies of hunter-gatherer societies, believing that such societies mirror the social and material conditions the human race faced during its formative period as a species. Such societies have no division of labor except for gender, and are politically egalitarian, decision-making power being quite equally distributed among the adult males of the community. Binmore infers that fairness norms must be self-enforcing, and cannot depend on a hierarchical leader (a "philosopher-king") to enforce ethical principals. Moreover, since a division of labor (except for gender) is absent, deliberations in such groups approximate the `original position.'
Binmore thus offers us a "coevolution of genes and culture" in which the acceptance of original position moral arguments is written into our genes, but the cultural content depends on local environmental conditions and random variation. Again drawing on the ethnographic literature, Binmore focuses on food sharing as the most important rule of justice to be decided by a foraging group. In foraging societies, high variance foodstuffs such as meat are equally shared, irrespective of who made the kill. Equal sharing is thus a moral rule justified by reasoning from the original position of hunters who do not know exactly which among them will be lucky or skilled.
Binmore uses evolutionary game theory to analyze social interactions. This adds a welcome degree of clarity to ethical reasoning. Indeed, Binmore is quite clear that all of his substantive results depend on the plausibility of the game theoretic models he presents and analyzes.
While fairness norms are biologically determined for Binmore, the players in Binmore's games are rational self-interested agents. Thus all of the results of two-person game theory based on the rational actor model can be deployed in analyzing social justice. It follows in particular that "[i]n a well-ordered society, each citizen honors the social contract because it is in his own self-interest to do so, provided that enough of his fellow citizens do the same." (5) There is no sense in which moral behavior is opposed to self-interested behavior. Moreover, since players do not behave ethically in bargaining, there is no sense in which the institutions resulting from their bargaining have any abstract normative standing. "Evolutionists simply seek to understand," says Binmore, "why some types of human organization survive better than others.... evolutionary ethics offers no authority whatsoever to those who wish to claim that some moral systems are somehow intrinsically superior to others.' (179)
Different societies can thus embrace different institutions because comparisons in the original position depend on `empathetic preferences' that are culturally specific. It is in part for this reason that Binmore calls himself a `whig,' by which he means a moderate progressive, not seduced by the grand visions of a totally alternative society as proposed by the Left and the Right. The latter two, he claims, make social judgments in a universal, ahistorical manner that have nothing to do with the actual fairness processes in real societies.
Just Playing is an important and welcome contribution to the literature. The book does, however, have some faults. The most salient is that crucial analytical material and discursive asides jumbled together. One must read the whole book, and make numerous references back and forth, to understand the basic argument. Moreover, the book is intended for a general audience interested in political philosophy, yet even professional economists will find the analytical parts difficult to follow.
Another problem is that Binmore uses evolutionary game theory where it suits him, but abandons it when it does not. For instance, while Binmore uses naturalism to justify the assertion that Homo sapiens is genetically programed to accept the original position, but he gives no empirical evidence that this is in fact the case. Moreover, it is implausible that evolution imprinted us with an original position orientation, but in no other way affected our moral behavior, so that the assumption of Homo economicus remains valid for bargaining purposes. Laboratory experiments reveal forms of prosocial behavior (e.g., rejecting `unfair' offers in an ultimatum game, or punishing free riders in a public goods game) that relate directly to questions of justice and fairness, yet contradict the Homo economicus model. The notion that human sociality can be explained by `enlightened self-interest,' even when accompanied by respect for the original position, will not likely survive a close study of the evidence (See my book Game Theory Evolving, Princeton University Press, 2000).
Upgrading Rawls' "Theory of Justice".......2000-06-24
In his exciting theory of the social contract Ken Binmore takes up the discussion that took place in the 70ies after the publication of John Rawls' "Theory of Justice". While he sticks to the idea of a social contract reached through voluntary agreement in the Original Position, he also considers the utilitarian critique such as Harsanyi's. But Binmore does much more than that. He translates Rawls' metaphysical idea of a reflective equilibrium into a two-stage bargaining game with flesh and bones. He stresses the tautological character of game-theoretic tools which in this context becomes an advantage. By comparison of the ethical properties of allocations reached via competitive markets and those reached through bargaining in the original position he tries to identify a demarcation line for the decentralized aggregation of individual preferences. Binmore's book is going to be a challenge to any reader interested in the problem of explaining progress in human societies.
Book Description
Through Teaching Games for Understanding: Theory, Research, and Practice, you can • gain a comprehensive perspective of the teaching games for understanding (TGfU) model, seeing it in context of its influences and evolution; • tap into the latest research and findings in the model, learning from worldwide experts in each of the topics covered; • consider how students learn best, what should be taught, and why it should be taught using the TGfU model; and • learn how to apply the TGfU approach at all educational levels.
Teaching games for understanding (TGfU) is a dynamic approach to sport education that has gained worldwide popularity over the past 25 years. Now, through Teaching Games for Understanding: Theory, Research, and Practice, readers can discover the latest refinements and up-to-date research from the world's highest-regarded experts on the topic.
This book presents a comprehensive look at the TGfU model and provides multiple perspectives from 17 contributors in 6 countries. As such, it is a valuable resource for preservice and in-service teachers, teacher educators, and coaches around the world. It details the history, theory, research, and practice of the approach (also known as the tactical games model and the games sense model) and enables readers to better understand and apply TGfU.
Teaching Games for Understanding includes the following features: • Opening scenarios or quotes to make the material relevant and draw the reader in • Discussion questions for each chapter to facilitate understanding and provide teachers with a ready-made starting point for review of the material • Chapter-ending summaries that present an overview of the material to help students test their understanding and recall the contents
Never before has a book presented such an all-encompassing analysis of the TGfU model. Every angle is covered. The book explores why and how to involve students in the construction of games, how to use the model in curriculums at the elementary and secondary levels and in teacher education programs, and how assessment factors in. It examines how to integrate the model with sport education, covers the social interactions and decision-making processes involved in the model, and details the implications of model-based instruction for research on teaching. It also presents real-life stories of teachers successfully implementing this approach. Finally, it takes a look at the future direction for TGfU, considering its continuing evolution.
Highly readable and widely applicable, Teaching Games for Understanding: Theory, Research, and Practice is a vital text in the field of sport education, affording readers a solid foundation for understanding and using TGfU.
Book Description
In this concise book based on his Arne Ryde Lectures in 2002, Young suggests a conceptual framework for studying strategic learning and highlights theoretical developments in the area. He discusses the interactive learning problem; reinforcement and regret; equilibrium; conditional no-regret learning; prediction, postdiction, and calibration; fictitious play and its variants; Bayesian learning; and hypothesis testing. Young's framework emphasizes the amount of information required to implement different types of learning rules, criteria for evaluating their performance, and alternative notions of equilibrium to which they converge. He also stresses the limits of what can be achieved: for a given type of game and a given amount of information, there may exist no learning procedure that satisfies certain reasonable criteria of performance and convergence. In short, Young has provided a valuable primer that delineates what we know, what we would like to know, and the limits of what we can know, when we try to learn about a system that is composed of other learners.
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