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Economic Commentary

A Beautiful Theory

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It wasn’t A Beautiful Mind—the book or the movie—that made John Forbes Nash, Jr., famous. It was his work in game theory, a theory that models strategic interactions between people as games. Before Nash, the only games theorists could get a handle on were artificial ones with no real-world applications. Nash’s insights enabled economists to expand the use of game theory to interesting practical problems.

04.15.2002EC 4/15/2002

The views authors express in Economic Commentary are theirs and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland or the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. The series editor is Tasia Hane. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. This paper and its data are subject to revision; please visit clevelandfed.org for updates.

Suggested Citation

Nosal, Ed, and Peter Rupert. 2002. “A Beautiful Theory.” Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Economic Commentary 4/15/2002.

This work by Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International