About this 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
Who is this class for: This course is aimed at students, researchers, and practitioners who wish to understand more about strategic interactions. You must be comfortable with mathematical thinking and rigorous arguments. Relatively little specific math is required; but you should be familiar with basic probability theory (for example, you should know what a conditional probability is), and some very light calculus would be helpful.
Taught by: Matthew O. Jackson, Professor
Economics
Taught by: Kevin Leyton-Brown, Professor
Computer Science
Taught by: Yoav Shoham, Professor
Computer Science
| Level | Beginner |
| Language | English |
| How To Pass | Pass all graded assignments to complete the course. |
| User Ratings |
- Video: Introductory Video
- Reading: Syllabus
- Video: 1-1 Game Theory Intro - TCP Backoff
- Discussion Prompt: Play the TCP game if you like
- Video: 1-2 Self-Interested Agents and Utility Theory
- Video: 1-3 Defining Games
- Video: 1-4 Examples of Games
- Discussion Prompt: Play some games after Lecture 1.4 if you like
- Video: 1-5 Nash Equilibrium Intro
- Video: 1-6 Strategic Reasoning
- Discussion Prompt: Play Keynes Beauty Contest Game if you like
- Video: 1-7 Best Response and Nash Equilibrium
- Video: 1-8 Nash Equilibrium of Example Games
- Video: 1-9 Dominant Strategies
- Video: 1-10 Pareto Optimality
- Practice Quiz: In-Video Quizzes Week 1
- Reading: A Brief Introduction to the Basics of Game Theory
- Video: 2-1 Mixed Strategies and Nash Equilibrium (I)
- Video: 2-2 Mixed Strategies and Nash Equilibrium (II)
- Video: 2-3 Computing Mixed Nash Equilibrium
- Video: 2-4 Hardness Beyond 2x2 Games - Basic
- Video: 2-4 Hardness Beyond 2x2 Games - Advanced
- Video: 2-5 Example: Mixed Strategy Nash
- Video: 2-6 Data: Professional Sports and Mixed Strategies
- Practice Quiz: In-Video Quizzes Week 2
- Video: 3-1 Beyond the Nash Equilibrium
- Video: 3-2 Strictly Dominated Strategies & Iterative Removal
- Video: 3-3 Dominated Strategies & Iterative Removal: An Application
- Video: 3-4 Maxmin Strategies
- Video: 3-4 Maxmin Strategies - Advanced
- Video: 3-5 Correlated Equilibrium: Intuition
- Practice Quiz: In-Video Quizzes Week 3
- Video: 4-1 Perfect Information Extensive Form: Taste
- Video: 4-2 Formalizing Perfect Information Extensive Form Games
- Discussion Prompt: Play the Centipede Game if you like
- Video: 4-3 Perfect Information Extensive Form: Strategies, BR, NE
- Video: 4-4 Subgame Perfection
- Video: 4-5 Backward Induction
- Video: 4-6 Subgame Perfect Application: Ultimatum Bargaining
- Video: 4-7 Imperfect Information Extensive Form: Poker
- Video: 4-8 Imperfect Information Extensive Form: Definition, Strategies
- Video: 4-9 Mixed and Behavioral Strategies
- Discussion Prompt: Play the Rainbow Warship game if you like
- Video: 4-10 Incomplete Information in the Extensive Form: Beyond Subgame Perfection
- Practice Quiz: In-Video Quizzes Week 4
- Video: 5-1 Repeated Games
- Discussion Prompt: Play some repeated games if you like
- Video: 5-2 Infinitely Repeated Games: Utility
- Video: 5-3 Stochastic Games
- Video: 5-4 Learning in Repeated Games
- Discussion Prompt: Play the repeated battle of the sexes game
- Video: 5-5 Equilibria of Infinitely Repeated Games
- Video: 5-6 Discounted Repeated Games
- Video: 5-7 A Folk Theorem for Discounted Repeated Games
- Practice Quiz: In-Video Quizzes Week 5
- Video: 6-1 Bayesian Games: Taste
- Video: 6-2 Bayesian Games: First Definition
- Video: 6-2 Bayesian Games: First Defintion (yoav)
- Video: 6-3 Bayesian Games: Second Definition
- Video: 6-4 Analyzing Bayesian Games
- Video: 6-5 Analyzing Bayesian Games: Another Example
- Practice Quiz: In-Video Quizzes Week 6
- Video: 7-1 Coalitional Game Theory: Taste
- Video: 7-2 Coalitional Game Theory: Definitions
- Video: 7-3 The Shapley Value
- Video: 7-4 The Core
- Video: 7-5 Comparing the Core and Shapley value in an Example
- Practice Quiz: In-Video Quizzes Week 7
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The course indeed provides a really good glimpse on major topics in game theory. I found it to be quite fun introduction and it made reading on the topic much easier. What can be improved: some of explanations could have been made clearer (mostly in formulas and definitions where it is not clear what exact variable/letter means) and, of course, it is very frustrating when you see/hear errors (some of which are corrected, some not).
excellent!
The course is really worth pursuing. The concepts taught are general but interesting unlike other domains of microeconomics.
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HC
Nice mix of applied and theoretical, explanations were good. Occasionally ventured into complexity analysis which interesting but rather out of sync with the rest of the course, would have been better to have fully explored it more fully towards the end or left it out imho. Overall very good but was a bit more basic than I'd hoped for from an 8 week course.