Game Theory
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Abstract
Game theory involves the study of cooperation and competition. It provides a theoretical framework for reasoning about a wide variety of phenomena including, for instance, the price of gasoline, nuclear proliferation, who pays for dinner when friends dine out, or the biological conditions necessary for the evolution of cooperation. This course presents the basic ideas of game theory, starting with how to represent and classify different kinds of interactions in terms of games where players choose among alternative strategies in order to maximize their own benefit. Game theory is useful across a broad range of scientific disciplines because situations involving conflicts of interest are ubiquitous, and because the meaning of “players” in game theory is very general. For example, players could be individual genes competing for representation in subsequent generations or whole countries negotiating trade agreements with each other. Of particular interest are social dilemmas where rational behaviour by individual players paradoxically does not necessarily lead to a collectively rational outcome. Such situations are sometimes referred to as a tragedy of the commons, a prisoner’s dilemma, or a public goods game and they characterize many social, economic, evolutionary biology, and political problems.