Course or series
Game Theory
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Lecture 1 - Introduction: Five First Lessons
Introduces strategic interaction by separating players, available actions and payoffs, then comparing a prisoners’ dilemma with a coordination problem.
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Lecture 2 - Putting Yourselves into Other People's Shoes
Develops strategic reasoning through dominated strategies, assumptions about other players and the distinction between knowledge and common knowledge.
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Lecture 3 - Iterative Deletion and the Median-Voter Theorem
Applies repeated elimination of dominated strategies to a model of electoral competition and introduces choosing a best response to a belief about another player.
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Lecture 4 - Best Responses in Soccer and Business Partnerships
Works through best responses using penalty kicks and a profit-sharing partnership, leading towards the idea of Nash equilibrium.
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Lecture 5 - Nash Equilibrium: Bad Fashion and Bank Runs
Defines Nash equilibrium and uses an investment game to examine coordination, multiple equilibria and undesirable collective outcomes.
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Lecture 6 - Nash Equilibrium: Dating and Cournot
Applies Nash equilibrium to a coordination game and to Cournot competition, discussing collusion and the consequences of different market arrangements.
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Lecture 7 - Nash Equilibrium: Shopping, Standing and Voting on a Line
Compares price competition with spatial models of customers and voters, including a classroom candidate-entry game.
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Lecture 8 - Nash Equilibrium: Location, Segregation and Randomization
Moves from electoral location to Schelling’s segregation game and then introduces randomised choices through mixed strategies.
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Lecture 9 - Mixed Strategies in Theory and Tennis
Uses tennis to derive mixed-strategy equilibria and explains why the pure strategies used in an optimal mixture must have equal expected payoffs.
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Lecture 10 - Mixed Strategies in Baseball, Dating and Paying Your Taxes
Distinguishes three interpretations of mixed strategies: actual randomisation, uncertainty about a player and proportions of a population using different actions.
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Lecture 11 - Evolutionary Stability: Cooperation, Mutation, and Equilibrium
Introduces evolutionary stability and relates it to domination and Nash equilibrium. Yale flags a notation error in the informal argument and supplies a correction in the accompanying notes.
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Lecture 12 - Evolutionary Stability: Social Convention, Aggression, and Cycles
Applies evolutionary stability to conventions and Hawk–Dove games, then considers a setting without an evolutionarily stable population.
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Lecture 13 - Sequential Games: Moral Hazard, Incentives, and Hungry Lions
Introduces sequential decisions and backward induction through lending, incentives and commitment examples.
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Lecture 14 - Backward Induction: Commitment, Spies, and First-Mover Advantages
Applies backward induction to sequential quantity competition and examines how commitment and information affect apparent first-mover advantages.
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Lecture 15 - Backward Induction: Chess, Strategies, and Credible Threats
Discusses solutions to finite perfect-information games, defines strategies in sequential games and examines equilibrium threats that may not be credible.
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Lecture 16 - Backward Induction: Reputation and Duels
Studies reputation in the chain-store paradox and a pre-emption game, using uncertainty about other players to revisit credible promises and threats.
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Lecture 17 - Backward Induction: Ultimatums and Bargaining
Builds a bargaining model from ultimatum offers to alternating offers, making patience, discounting and knowledge of the bargaining surplus explicit.
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Lecture 18 - Imperfect Information: Information Sets and Sub-Game Perfection
Uses information sets to represent what players cannot distinguish, then introduces subgame perfection for games with sequential and simultaneous components.
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Lecture 19 - Subgame Perfect Equilibrium: Matchmaking and Strategic Investments
Applies subgame-perfect equilibrium to examples involving mistakes, matchmaking and investment, including how an investment changes competitors’ choices.
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Lecture 20 - Subgame Perfect Equilibrium: Wars of Attrition
Analyses wars of attrition in short and potentially continuing games, asking why costly conflict can persist under particular rational-choice assumptions.
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Lecture 21 - Repeated Games: Cooperation vs. the End Game
Examines repeated games, end-of-game incentives and the use of future outcomes to sustain present cooperation.
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Lecture 22 - Repeated Games: Cheating, Punishment, and Outsourcing
Continues repeated-game analysis with credible rewards and punishments, contrasting severe and milder punishment strategies as relationships endure.
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Lecture 23 - Asymmetric Information: Silence, Signaling and Suffering Education
Studies communication under asymmetric information, contrasting verifiable disclosure with costly signals and discussing education as a signalling example.
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Lecture 24 - Asymmetric Information: Auctions and the Winner's Curse
Compares auction formats and distinguishes common-value from private-value settings, using a classroom auction to introduce the winner’s curse.