Popularized by movies such as "A Beautiful Mind," game theory is the mathematical modeling of strategic interaction among rational (and irrational) agents. Beyond what we call `games' in common language, such as chess, poker, soccer, etc., it includes the modeling of conflict among nations, political campaigns, competition among firms, and trading behavior in markets such as the NYSE. How could you begin to model keyword auctions, and peer to peer file-sharing networks, without accounting for the incentives of the people using them? The course will provide the basics: representing games and strategies, the extensive form (which computer scientists call game trees), Bayesian games (modeling things like auctions), repeated and stochastic games, and more. We'll include a variety of examples including classic games and a few applications.
Offered By
Game Theory
Stanford UniversityAbout this Course
Learner Career Outcomes
23%
23%
Shareable Certificate
100% online
Flexible deadlines
Beginner Level
Approx. 12 hours to complete
English
Skills you will gain
Learner Career Outcomes
23%
23%
Shareable Certificate
100% online
Flexible deadlines
Beginner Level
Approx. 12 hours to complete
English
Offered by
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is an American private research university located in Stanford, California on an 8,180-acre (3,310 ha) campus near Palo Alto, California, United States.
The University of British Columbia
The University of British Columbia is a global centre for research and teaching.
Syllabus - What you will learn from this course
Week 1: Introduction and Overview
Introduction, overview, uses of game theory, some applications and examples, and formal definitions of: the normal form, payoffs, strategies, pure strategy Nash equilibrium, dominant strategies
Week 2: Mixed-Strategy Nash Equilibrium
pure and mixed strategy Nash equilibria
Week 3: Alternate Solution Concepts
Iterative removal of strictly dominated strategies, minimax strategies and the minimax theorem for zero-sum game, correlated equilibria
Week 4: Extensive-Form Games
Perfect information games: trees, players assigned to nodes, payoffs, backward Induction, subgame perfect equilibrium, introduction to imperfect-information games, mixed versus behavioral strategies.
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