Monotone Games:

This monograph unifies the study of interdependent incentives and outcomes when each person's choice affects the well-being of others in particular ways: codirectional, contradirectional, or a combination of the two. Games with strategic complements exhibit codirectional incentives, or incentives for each player to move in the same direction as other players. Games with strategic substitutes exhibit contradirectional incentives, or incentives for each player to move in the direction opposite to other players. Monotone games include both types of players: some players have incentives to move in the same direction as other players and some players have incentives to move in the direction opposite to other players.

The general incentives and outcomes featured in monotone games arise in applications in a large number of disciplines, including anthropology, biology, business, computer science, economics, mathematics, medicine, philosophy, physics, political science, psychology, sociology, and others.

The author identifies unifying threads across different cases, shows how newer results are similar to or different from previous results, and how readers may better understand seemingly different results under the single umbrella of monotone games. This is the first publication providing such a unification. Many new theorems are proved as well. The exposition is mathematically rigorous. The book is a new milestone in our understanding of large classes of interdependent societal interactions and it will guide researchers and students for many years to come.

Selected material was presented by the author in his Berkeley lectures on monotone games, a series of invited lectures at the University of California at Berkeley in Spring 2022.