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Title: Games Prisoners Play : The Tragicomic Worlds of Polish Prison by Marek M. Kaminski ISBN: 0-691-11721-7 Publisher: Princeton University Press Pub. Date: 10 May, 2004 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $29.95

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: Not just "another applied game theory book"
Comment: Kaminski is this amazing guy who ran a famous underground publishing house in Poland /but even dissidents in Czechia, Moravia and Hungary will proudly display books which came out of his firm /, spent five months in prison for doing it, but 17 years down the line ends up at the Institute of Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at UCI. Where he finally decides to put together the skills with the experiences and writes 'Games Prisoners Play,' not your typical applied game theory book. The reader is instantly immersed in the world of communist prison subculture and, perhaps surprisingly, finds it's not a world of unpredictable sadists, rapers and madmen. Even when they swallow metal, inject diseases into their blood and develop an incomprehensible form of communication - argot, they're just optimizing. Playing games of incomplete information and making rational decisions. Or at least their behavior can be interpreted as such. Don't get me wrong, they do have a spiritual life as well - they write poetry, carve chess figurines out of bread, paint their bodies in tattoos, brew tea between joking and story telling. But it's for their capacity constant analysis, updating beliefs and processing newly acquired information that by the end of the book you believe Kaminski saying that when he was dismissed he nearly regretted leaving because he felt his research was not yet complete. Now, that's what I call academic commitment!