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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Game Theory by Stanford University

4.6
stars
4,706 ratings

About the Course

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. You can find a full syllabus and description of the course here: http://web.stanford.edu/~jacksonm/GTOC-Syllabus.html There is also an advanced follow-up course to this one, for people already familiar with game theory: https://www.coursera.org/learn/gametheory2/ You can find an introductory video here: http://web.stanford.edu/~jacksonm/Intro_Networks.mp4...

Top reviews

WY

May 16, 2017

Great ! Interesting and abound at the same time. Hope Professors will clarify the strategic utility function more clearly because it's hard for students with poor math basic(forget most><) right now!

SC

Feb 7, 2022

I would have preferred a more mathematically rigorous treatment of the subject. Nevertheless, this was a great course — the instructors expounded all concepts with exceptional clarity and engagement.

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51 - 75 of 939 Reviews for Game Theory

By Jess

Jul 8, 2021

Thanks coursera for providing this course, unfortunely I have quit without finishing, because the structure of this course was confusing to me, the subject of contents are incoherent or at least not for student who is new in this field. Another opinion is that the quality of videos has quite some room to be improved.

By Manuel G R V

Aug 8, 2020

Game theory tries to solve an interesting subject with methods that rely on assumptions of optimization that are not necessarily true in real life. Instructors gave practically zero examples of cases where the application of these methods worked.

By Alan D

Jan 27, 2020

This course was pretty terrible: there was actually very little content outside of a bunch of definitions and overly-complex formalism for the sake of formalism (i.e. the formalisms provide no actual mathematical insight into the topics).

By Alessandro S

Jan 1, 2021

I could not solve the first questionnaire because the topics were treated shortly during the first week of course. In particular, I have not received specific instructions on how to find precisely a dominant strategy.

By Chris R

Mar 11, 2018

Very poorly executed. Lot's of errors in videos which should have been re-shot not just had corrections placed on them in subtitle form. I learned more from YouTube videos

By michael g

Nov 27, 2022

needs to be edited. so many mistakes it almost seems as if the lecturers are rambling. could also be more concise

By Mohammad Z

Jul 30, 2018

terrible lectures. very poorly explained subjects. You're better off reading a wikipedia page.

By j

Dec 5, 2016

Very formal and difficult to follow. Not for beginners. Not recommended for pros.

By Hannes V

Jul 4, 2018

Not practical, difficult to see how you would implement in everyday life

By Kshitij B

Sep 10, 2021

This is clearly not a beginner level course

By Souptik M

May 24, 2018

monotonous

By Derek J D

Mar 11, 2018

Much too academic for a layman - I thought it would offer more interesting insights into real-life issues instead of endless abstraction.

By Evangelos G L

Nov 12, 2021

Definitely not for begginers. Goes deep from the very start, with lots of maths, without proper explanation of the terms used.

By Maryeme Z

May 19, 2023

Difficult to pass the quizes based on the lectures as they are very theorotical and quizes are practice examples

By FELIPE B R

Jan 24, 2021

Difícil compreensão das equações e fórmulas matemáticas apresentadas

By Kongkona T

Sep 5, 2021

the professors are so boring

By ARNAV

Sep 2, 2020

Very obscure course!!!!!

By Daniel M

Feb 21, 2022

Pesimas explicaciones

By sarthak g

Jul 29, 2020

didnt understand much

By Takahide M

Oct 3, 2022

No good.

By Aishwarya U

Jun 14, 2017

I really enjoyed the course, which I pursued, at a time, I was commencing a project on multi-agent systems. Basically, two opponent robots and how they'd "strategise" against each other, for different tasks.

The lectures/quizzes/ course structure were a HUGE boost to formulating and well, I wouldn't' go as far as saying, solving, but moving towards solving the research problem, as this course helped me understand the technicalities of game theory as well as develop an intuition towards the approach.

One more point I'd raise in praise, is how, as the instructors are from diverse backgrounds, it lends a certain universality to thinking about the applications that come with every week's module - which, is contrary to my usual style of learning, but in this case, mind-expanding.

All in all, I really enjoyed the structure, and look forward to learning and applying further in my doctoral studies. Thanks a lot to the instructors and Coursera for giving me the opportunity to do so!

By Francesco G

Oct 15, 2020

Very challenging and very interesting!

This is the hardest and most interesting course I have ever taken!

I have taken a few courses online in the last few months, as I believe in such a complicated time when even the most obvious logic is killed every day, we need to keep our brain sharp and our society united and tolerant.

Only a continuous dialogue and the awakening of human intelligence will save our societies.

After studying Game Theory again, I am more and more convinced that most of the so called "social distancing regulations" taken by Governments worldwide, are not only illegal, but also totally inefficient in the sense of not optimizing the outcomes for all stakeholders (either we consider the Pareto optimum or a Nash equilibrium), and creating strong economic and social distortions.

I will come back on this topic later on. Open about discussion with whoever is interested about the topic.

By Felix M

Jan 17, 2020

I think this course covers the basics of Game Theory well. The three professors are competent and explain the topics well. I also enjoyed the assignments because of their practical nature.

If I had to name possible improvements I would suggest three things. One of the professors tends to talk very fast and is hard to follow sometimes. While I enjoyed the assignments more real world examples and applications would have been nice. Finally, I think the last week before the final assignment (week 7) about coalition games felt a little bit rushed and I had a hard time doing the assignment based on the video lectures alone. I had to use external materials to finish the assignment. Of course, that is totally acceptable, but I didn't have to do that for the prior weeks which were self contained.

By Manhar M

Jun 22, 2020

While I think the course material is really good for someone who has had a taste of game theory in the past and works as an excellent prerequisite to the advanced topics, the mathematical proofs should have been given more weightage. In addition, Prof. Yoav should work a little more on improving his explanatory skills, and giving some background before getting into algorithms that are derived from the field of computer science. Some additional readings and citing sources for certain topics would be useful for people wanting to read up more (like Prof. Jackson did for the proof for the Shapley Value). All in all, a pretty resourceful course.

By Nikolaj M

Oct 9, 2016

This course is great. The teachers provide excellent exposition of the problems, the formalization, and the solution concepts of generic agents and types of agents acting simultaneously, sequentially in games with complete and incomplete information. The math required is middle school probability calculation and equations. The formal definitions of games and concepts are more demanding, but a complete understanding of the formal definition is not required to solve the problem sets or the exam. The teachers are good at giving explanations and examples in a natural language to scaffold the understanding of the formal definitions.