Game Theory

Catalog description

Game theory is the study of interactive decision-making: making choices in the context of other agents who are also making choices. Famous examples include the "Prisoner's Dilemma" (pitting rational self-interest against the benefits of cooperation), and the "Cournot duopoly" (a basic model of market competition and supply-and-demand). Game theory has been applied to situations as diverse as traffic flow, auctions, the search and competition for scarce resources, and bargaining. This course will develop conceptual and technical facility with the mathematical tools used to model and analyze such situations. We will cover games in strategic and extensive form and games of perfect and imperfect information; we'll also study solution concepts such as Nash equilibrium and rationalizability. Finally, throughout the course we will take the opportunity to actually play several of the games we study to help build intuitions and foster insights into the formal mathematical models we develop.