3,801 works, 471 books, 3,267 articles, 60 other works, 3 awaiting classification, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Economics cannot become exact merely by borrowing the vocabulary of mathematics; it must first clarify what utility, strategy, coalition and stability mean. From that conviction von Neumann and Morgenstern rebuild economic behavior as interdependent choice, where each participant maximizes an outcome he does not control—so games, not single-agent calculation, become the governing model. Read here in the German translation of the 1944 Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, the argument runs from an axiomatic numerical utility through the minimax theorem for two-person zero-sum games, where rational play may demand mixed strategies and probability becomes part of optimal design rather than uncertainty. Extending to n-person games, they replace the single optimal outcome with stable sets of imputations—standards of behavior that resist internal domination—and turn coalitions, bargaining and market organization into formal objects against the Lausanne equilibrium tradition.
Man kann nicht exakte Methoden verwenden, solange keine Klarheit in den Begriffen und Fragen besteht, auf die sie angewendet werden sollen.
English translation: “One cannot employ exact methods so long as there is no clarity concerning the concepts and questions to which they are to be applied.”
A game can treat every player alike without requiring equal payoffs—or even fully symmetric solution sets. In this RAND paper, published in 1961 from a 1946 manuscript, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern investigate a cooperative game in which a coalition wins only if it contains all but at most one player. They impose symmetry on the first n−1 players while leaving the last player outside that requirement. This deliberate asymmetry makes a precise question accessible: how low can the remaining player’s minimum payoff be, and how large can gaps in that player’s possible payoffs become? By redistributing payoffs and testing domination, the authors derive bounds rather than a complete classification. The paper offers a concrete encounter with how symmetry can constrain stable solutions without determining them outright.