Princeton economics professor Avinash Dixit has done groundbreaking work on business decision-making under conditions of great uncertainty. His lectures on game theory became the basis for Thinking Strategically. Born in 1944, Dixit got his PhD from MIT and has taught there, at UC Berkeley, at Oxford and Warwick in England, and at Princeton. 

Barry Nalebuff teaches business management at Yale. He consults for major businesses and writes articles for national periodicals; his six books have 400,000 copies in print, and his online lectures on negotiation at Coursera are the second-most recommended. Nalebuff earned degrees from MIT and used his Rhodes Scholarship to earn a PhD at Oxford. 

University of Maryland public policy professor Thomas Schelling shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work that expanded game theory to include nuclear war strategy. He’s famous for his concept of brinkmanship, the act of dragging opponents to the edge of disaster to force them to make concessions, a principle widely understood among nations with nuclear weapons. He’s also known for Schelling Points—locations, or focal points, where people find each other without agreeing to beforehand—and he did significant work on racial balance in neighborhoods.