Online Text and Notes in Game Theory

This is an introduction to the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. It allows the reader to play against three strategies, and discusses what is learnt about co-operation and forgiveness by egotists. It ends with discussion questions and further reading suggestions.

Part of the Open Yale service, this course is an introduction to game theory and strategic thinking. Ideas such as dominance, backward induction, Nash equilibrium, evolutionary stability, commitment, credibility, asymmetric information, adverse selection, and signalling are discussed and applied to games played in class and to examples drawn from economics, politics, the movies, and elsewhere. It is taught by Ben Polak and features videos, audio, course syllabus and lecture notes.

Detailed notes and slides from a course of 18 lectures are archived here by MIT's Open CourseWare project. The course was given in 2000, 2001 and 2002. The course covers, "Analysis of strategic behavior in multi-person economic settings. Introduction to Nash equilibrium and its refinements: subgame-perfect equilibrium and sequential equilibrium. Applications drawn from labor economics, the economics of organization, industrial organization, international trade, and macroeconomics."

Detailed lecture notes, slides, problem sets and exam questions from Muhamet Yildiz's 'Economic applications of game theory' course in 2004. The syllabus, lecture notes, slides, exams and problem sets are available to download as PDF files. It includes supplementary notes on rationaliazability, partnership games and forward induction.

This 39-page PDF document is a draft of an encyclopedia entry and has been released as a research report by LSE's Centre for Discrete and Applicable Mathematics. It has ten sections and includes a glossary. The final version was published in volume 2 of the Encyclopedia of Information Systems in 2002.

From a game theory course taught at the LSE Maths department, this page collects exercises and solution sets (in different HTML files) and old exam papers in PDF. It also includes a comprehensive set of notes on game theory, available as a PDF download of over 150 pages. There are links to audio and video of lectures, but these are only available to members of the LSE.

This 134-page PDF booklet was compiled from lecture notes for a course in Game Theory at the University of Kaiserslautern. The course was delivered in Winter 2003/04 and the manuscript was released in March 2007. After an introductory chapter discussing two-person games, the chapters are "Brouwer's Fixed Point Theorem and Nash's Equilibrium Theorem", "More general Equilibrium Theorems", "Cooperative Games", and "Differential Games".

The Nobel Foundation makes available a great deal of material on each of the Economics prize winners, including video of each Prize Lecture since Robert Mundell in 1999. As well as a lay introduction to each prize winner's research, there are "Advanced information" links giving a more technical explanation. This link is to the Economics Network's quick index of lecture videos and related materials on the site. Each video is a full lecture (usually between 40 and 60 minutes) with good audio and video quality, and pitched at a non-technical audience. Transcripts of each lecture are available.

This set of talks was given on 8 January 2009 as part of the PhD seminar series organised by the School of Economics and Finance of the University of St Andrews. Prof. Thomas Lux speaks on how economic systems can be seen as evolutionary models, where agents interact with each other and a selection process favours the most successful. He introduces underlying dynamical systems as well as the necessary game theoretic concepts. Video can be downloaded in WMV format and presentation slides / handouts are also available.

Archived handouts, slides and exercises from a 2009 course, organised around 21 lectures. The course contains many case studies.

Al Roth's game theory, experimental economics and market design page includes introductory articles called: Game-Theoretic Models of Bargaining, Two-Sided Matching Models, Experimental Economics, Is Economics a Science?, and Matching and Allocation in Medicine and Health Care.

Game Theory : an introductory sketch by Roger A. McCain presents nearly twenty sections of an introductory game theory textbook. The site uses frames so that the index page and a content page are always presented together. The examples of game theory applications include queuing, college applications and marriage vows.

Modeling bounded rationality is a textbook on advanced game theoretic models of bounded rationality, written by Ariel Rubinstein in 1998. It "provides potential material for a one-term graduate course. The choice of material is highly subjective. Bibliographic notes appear at the end of each chapter. The projects that follow those notes contain speculative material and ideas that the reader should consider with caution." The book is available as a single PDF file of 220 pages to download.

This document lists historical milestones in the development of game theory up to the awarding of the Nobel Prizes to Nash, Harsanyi and Selten (1994) and Aumann and Schelling (2005). Entries are short paragraphs within a timeline. It includes bibliographical notes for reference.

These are the detailed notes from a summer school course on the relations between decision theory and knowledge. This text looks into the foundations of decision theory and their relevance to inference and to the theory of information. The files, totalling 49 pages, are available as a zipped set of Word documents or a zipped set of PDFs.

This is a single-page summary of the Game Theory chapter of the authors' "Finite Mathematics" textbook. It includes a simple interactive game in Javascript. Links at the top of the page take you to an interactive quiz on the topic and a game solver. It has been produced by Stefan Waner and Steven R. Costenoble of Hofstra University.

These are the extensive materials used in a course "taught to students in their second year of the economics PhD program at the University of Arizona during the 1992-1997 period." More than 260 pages of material are archived, in six course sections; "Strategic Form Games", "Nonequilibrium Solution Concepts", "Nash Equilibrium", "Extensive-form Games," "Repeated Games" and "Bayesian Games".

At the foot of this page are extensive notes from 15 lectures by a philosopher on game theory and rational choice. Topics include the Allais and Ellsburg paradoxes, criteria of rationality and evolutionary considerations.

This is the companion site for Rasmusen's game theory text, with downloadable chapters in PDF format. Available from the same site are the diagrams from the book in .jpg format.