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The bi-polar confrontation between the Soviet Union and the USA involved many leading game theorists from both sides of the Iron Curtain: Oskar Morgenstern, John von Neumann, Michael Intriligator, John Nash, Thomas Schelling and Steven Brams from the United States and Nikolay Vorob’ev, Leon A. Petrosyan, Elena B. Yanovskaya and Olga N. Bondareva from the Soviet Union. The formalization of game theory (GT) took place prior to the Cold War but the geopolitical confrontation hastened and shaped its evolution. In our article we outline four similarities and differences between Western GT and Soviet GT: 1) the Iron Curtain resulted in a lagged evolution of GT in the Soviet Union; 2) Soviet GT focused more on operations research and issues of centralized planning; 3) the contemporary Western view on Soviet GT was biased and Soviet contributions, including works on dynamic stability, non-emptiness of the core and many refinements, suggest that Soviet GT was able to catch up to the Western level relatively fast; 4) international conferences, including Vilnius, 1971, fostered interaction between Soviet game theorists and their Western colleagues. In general, we consider the Cold War to be a positive environment for GT in the West and in the Soviet Union.

The article provides a rhetorical analysis of the New Institutional Economics based on the works of its main representatives - R. Coase, O. Williamson and D. North. The author exposes the specific features of scientific rhetoric characteristic for each of these scientists, reconstructs their biographies and shows, how and why their theories came to be integrated into mainstream economics.

The article that is devoted to the appearance of the Russian edition of Samuel Bowles "Microeconomics. Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution" considers possible changes that may be brought by the new research program outlined in the book. The author analyzes the main arguments and rhetorical strategies applied by Bowles and shows that the major shift that this book may entail can be the merger of microeconomics and institutional economics that may lead to vanishing of the latter as a distinct discipline and its integration into the vast field of microeconomic analysis.

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