Back to Game Theory II: Advanced Applications
Stanford University

Game Theory II: Advanced Applications

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

Status: Decision Making
Status: Behavioral Economics
AdvancedCourse17 hours

Featured reviews

GL

5.0Reviewed 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

AV

4.0Reviewed Jun 3, 2020

Great course. Very relevant to a lot of problems in business. Content was overtly mathematical. More practical examples cold have been interesting to solve.

AA

5.0Reviewed Mar 12, 2018

Solid through the entire course, good lectures and interesting tasks. Only missing a few explanations in some of the task.

HP

5.0Reviewed Nov 5, 2020

I learned strategic thinking and how to make applied that in real world with various Game Theory methods. Thanks

MP

5.0Reviewed Apr 15, 2017

Thank you for giving me excellent information on game theory. It is very helpful course for me. Thank you Stanford University,The University of British Columbia and Coursera.

AV

5.0Reviewed Jul 16, 2020

This was a wonderful and very mathematically intensive course, but completing all the quizzes gave a great sense of accomplishment and developed my understanding of game theory and its various facets.

PI

5.0Reviewed Jul 25, 2020

The subject is quite interesting, one of my favourites, if not my favourite, in economic theory. Both this and Game Theory I had concepts I din't previous knew, with didatic explanations.

BF

4.0Reviewed Aug 11, 2022

The videos are good, the assignments as well, the book recommended is especially good, but it´s unfortunate that there is no feedback on assignments.

GV

4.0Reviewed Feb 17, 2017

Great course. Nice retracing of some notions of the course Game Theory like Pareto Oprimality. Nice idea doing some examples on auctions and voting systems. Nice proofs

PS

5.0Reviewed Apr 24, 2021

An excellent resource to learn Game Theory, I would say at a graduate level. This course helped me a lot!

QB

4.0Reviewed Aug 21, 2022

The course covers a lot of deep and interesting topics but some concepts are just given without proper explanation and there aren't enough exercises before writing quizzes or exams.

AK

5.0Reviewed Jan 9, 2019

Brilliant mind-teaser, helps you form skills that will lead to logical thinking in strategic interplays between everyday events and even the more complex one.

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