Classical Game Theory
Goals
- Learn the foundations of game theory, enable you to talk to (and work with) economists.
- Learn how to transform informal ideas into formal mathematical models
Syllabus
- Week 1. Introduction
- Week 2. Static games with complete information I: Elimination of dominated strategies
- Week 3. Static games with complete information II: Elimination of dominated strategies, Nash equilibrium
- Week 4. Static games with complete information III: Nash equilibria
- Week 5. Sequential games with complete information I: Backward Induction
- Week 6. Sequential games with complete information II: Subgame perfection and repeated games
- Week 7. Sequential games with complete information III: Repeated games
- Week 8. Games with incomplete information
- Week 9. Sequential games with incomplete information: Perfect Bayesian Nash equilibrium, Signalling games
- Content Summary
- A historical timeline of events
Exercises
- Static games with complete information I: Elimination of dominated strategies
- Static games with complete information II: Elimination of dominated strategies, Nash equilibrium
- Static games with complete information III: Nash equilibria
- Sequential games with complete information I: Backward Induction
- Sequential games with complete information II: Subgame perfection and repeated games
- Sequential games with complete information III: Repeated games
- Games with incomplete information
Reading list
- Classical game theory
- Fudenberg and Tirole: Game Theory (MIT University Press, 1991)
- Michael Osborne: An introduction to game theory (Oxford University Press, 2003)
- Kenneth Binmore: Game theory: A very short introduction (Oxford University Press, 2007)
- Evolutionary game theory
- Hofbauer and Sigmund: Evolutionary games and population dynamics (Cambridge University Press, 1998)
- Hauert and Traulsen: Stochastic evolutionary dynamics (Book chapter)
- Sigmund: Calculus of selfishness (Princeton University Press, 2010)
- Nowak: Evolutionary dynamics (Harvard University Press, 2006)
- Cool papers related to the course
- Hofbauer and Sandholm: Survival of dominated strategies under evolutionary dynamics’ (Theoretical Economics, 2011)
- Christos Papadimitriou: The complexity of finding Nash equilibria (Book chapter) (Cambridge University Press, 2007)