BDS 509: Applied Game Theory

Basic Information

Instructor: Nawaaz Khalfan

E-mail: khalfan@sas.upenn.edu

Lectures: Mondays and Wednesdays, 12:00-1:45, June 30th till August 5th, 2022

Office hours: after class (use class link) or by appointment

Syllabus

The most current syllabus can be found using this link (07/16).

Links

The following links will give you access to all the course material. [Please contact me if the material isn't available after the quoted date.]

Lecture slides, recordings and additional material

• Lecture One: Introduction

  • Reading: Part one of Don Ross's entry on Game Theory in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

  • Bonus media: Clip from Seinfeld, "George's job"

• Lecture Two: Equilibria and Benchmarks

  • Bonus media: Tyler Cowen's interview with Marc Andreessen from Conversations with Tyler

• Lecture Three: Lotteries

  • Bonus media: Nigel Warburton's interviews with Daniel Kahneman, Robert Shiller, and Gerd Gigerenzer

• Lecture Four: Mixed Strategies

  • Bonus media: Some fun examples from Taskmaster - potatoes and rubber ducks

• Lecture Five: Sequential Games

  • Bonus media: Ashley Hodgson's Harry Potter game

• Lecture Six: Repeated Games

  • Bonus media: an aside about rewards and punishments by Veritasium

• Lecture Seven: Review Session (scribble notes)

  • Bonus media: looking beyond grim trigger with a video from This Place, and the Pirate Game was talked about on Ted-Ed

• Lecture Eight: Public Goods

  • Bonus media: A Tale of Two Fisheries By John Tierney (New York Times)

• Lecture Nine: Games of Uncertainty

  • Bonus media: An illustration of Bayes theorem by 3Blue1Brown

  • Thanks for your attention!

Additional Resources

Here are two (non required) resources I recommend:

• Dixit, A., Skeath, S., and Reiley, D. (2014). Games of Strategy, fourth edition. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, and

• Matthew Jackson's online Game Theory course through Coursera

Assessment

• Assignment One

• Final Exam