STAT/ECON 473 Game Theory

Spring 2016

Week 1 Introduction, Quick overview of decision making with one decision maker, decisions under uncertainty: utility functions, rational choice introduction to game theory: extensive and strategic normal forms, information sets, strategies
Read The material on decision making with one decision maker is done (at a high level) in Chapter 27 sections 1 and 2. Read Chapters 1 and 2.
Week 2 Dominant strategies and dominance solutions, strongly dominant and weakly dominant strategies, auctions, Iterated Elimination of Dominated Strategies (IEDS) and Iterated Elimination of Strongly Dominated Strategies (IESDS), Bertrand duopoly,
Read Chapters 3 and 4
Week 3 Nash equilibrium, best responses, relation to IEDS and IESDS solutions, Cournot oligopoly, Stackleberg duopoly
Read Chapters 5 and 6
Week 4 Tragedy of the Commons, mixed strategies,
Read Chapter 7 and 8
Week 5 symmetric games, natural monopoly, bankruptcy example, extensive form games, backward induction, perfect information,
Read Chapter 9, 11
Week 6 research and development example, general extensive games, subgame perfect equilibrium
Read Chapter 12, 13
Week 7 subgame perfect equilibrium, review, midterm 1
Read
Week 8 poker model, mixed v. behavioral strategies, Finitely Repeated Games
Read Chapters 14
Week 9 Infinitely Repeated Games, discounting factors, grim trigger strategies, applications to duopoly, trust game
Read Chapters 15 (skip section 15.4)
Week 10 other punishments, Folk Theorem, Rubinstein bargaining model, incomplete information games
Read Chapter 20 (skip 20.2.3)
Week 11 Bayesian games, Bayes-Nash equilibrium
Read Chapter 20 (skip 20.2.3), 21
Week 12 extensive games of incomplete information, beliefs, review, Midterm 2
Read Chapter 24
Week 13 perfect Bayesian equilibrium, signaling games, pooling and separating equilibria Read Chapter 24
Week 14 more on signaling games , auctions
Read Chapter 23
Week 15 evolutionary games
Read

For the material on Bayesian games, perfect Bayesian equilibrium and auctions I will only be loosely following the book. Below are some on-line resources that are closer in spirit to my lecturers.

Last revised: 4/23/16