Games are played whenever people interact, wherever there are strategies to adopt and outcomes or prizes to win. And that means games are played everywhere: from economics to evolutionary biology, from prison escapes to online poker, and from romantic liaisons to Cold War stand-offs. Game theory is the study of such games — what happens when they are played rationally, and how we can predict their outcomes. This lively *Very Short Introduction* shows how game theory can be understood without mathematical equations, and how, from one simple premise, there springs a remarkably rich theory that has already had a profound effect on the sciences, and may yet revolutionize disciplines as far apart as psychology, ethics, and politics.
A Nash equilibrium is just a pair of strategies whose use results in a cell in which both payoffs are circled. More generally, a Nash equilibrium occurs when all the players are simultaneously making a best reply to the strategy choices of the others.
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