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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Game Theory II: Advanced Applications by Stanford University

4.7
stars
650 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. Over four weeks of lectures, this advanced course considers how to design interactions between agents in order to achieve good social outcomes. Three main topics are covered: social choice theory (i.e., collective decision making and voting systems), mechanism design, and auctions. In the first week we consider the problem of aggregating different agents' preferences, discussing voting rules and the challenges faced in collective decision making. We present some of the most important theoretical results in the area: notably, Arrow's Theorem, which proves that there is no "perfect" voting system, and also the Gibbard-Satterthwaite and Muller-Satterthwaite Theorems. We move on to consider the problem of making collective decisions when agents are self interested and can strategically misreport their preferences. We explain "mechanism design" -- a broad framework for designing interactions between self-interested agents -- and give some key theoretical results. Our third week focuses on the problem of designing mechanisms to maximize aggregate happiness across agents, and presents the powerful family of Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanisms. The course wraps up with a fourth week that considers the problem of allocating scarce resources among self-interested agents, and that provides an introduction to auction theory. You can find a full syllabus and description of the course here: http://web.stanford.edu/~jacksonm/GTOC-II-Syllabus.html There is also a predecessor course to this one, for those who want to learn or remind themselves of the basic concepts of game theory: https://www.coursera.org/learn/game-theory-1 An intro video can be found here: http://web.stanford.edu/~jacksonm/Game-Theory-2-Intro.mp4...

Top reviews

GL

Oct 18, 2022

V​ery interesting and challenging... I wish there were more practical/real-world examples to learn the concepts but I was very glad to take this course

BT

Aug 23, 2021

I​ have been grateful to be part of both Game Theory I and II, thank you for all this was very helpful for my career

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126 - 132 of 132 Reviews for Game Theory II: Advanced Applications

By Telmo J P P

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Oct 18, 2017

Interesting, but not as good as part I. Some parts of the syllabus were not explained well enough: a lot of results just come out of thin air, and not a lot of intuitions are given.

By Emil

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Dec 1, 2020

Diverse course, which covered various topics. For the election processes however one could some illegal practices, which also could lead to a win. A democratic win...

By Martín B

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Sep 18, 2019

Should have much more real examples. Voting schemes was right, but mechanism design was completely abstract

By Carlos F S T

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Nov 15, 2017

No es tan bueno como el primero. Sin embargo, tomarlo como continuación es interesante.

By Jeppe v P

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Jun 8, 2017

Interesting material, but sometimes hard to follow the lectures.

By Bernd K

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Jun 26, 2022

I'm a little disappointed. I expected more from the course. game theoretic applications are very diverse. Here I miss the economic application of the oligopoly theory. More economic applications will likely require another course. The level of difficulty is not as high as in the game theory course.

By michael g

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Apr 30, 2023

one of the lecturers is barely able to explain the material succinctly. the other two are basically rambling and tripping over their own words trying to sound smart. material is unnecessarily repeated.