Game Theory

Game Theory is Ben Polak's Fall 2007 course ECON 159, recorded for Open Yale Courses as 24 lectures of about 75 minutes. It builds the subject up in stages: dominance and putting yourself in others' shoes, iterative deletion and the median-voter theorem, best responses and Nash equilibrium across examples from soccer, business partnerships, bank runs, dating and location choice, mixed strategies in tennis and baseball, evolutionary stability, sequential games and backward induction, subgame perfection, wars of attrition, repeated games and cooperation, and finally asymmetric information, signalling and auctions. Games are played in class and examples are drawn from economics, politics and film.

The syllabus states that introductory microeconomics is required, that intermediate microeconomics is recommended, and that the course uses mostly one-variable calculus along with probability and expectation; it lists three optional textbooks. Lectures come as streaming or downloadable video, audio and searchable transcripts, and the problem sets and exams are not graded for online viewers. Open Yale Courses is free with no registration, certificate or credit.