Curriculum Game Theory & Strategic Decision-Making
Game Theory & Strategic Decision-Making
The economics of strategy - how people and institutions make decisions when the outcome depends on what everyone else does too.
- What Game Theory Actually Studies The core idea behind game theory - decision-making where the outcome depends on what everyone else does too, not just your own choice. 📄 Read-aloud
- The Prisoner's Dilemma The most famous scenario in game theory - and why two people acting entirely rationally in their own self-interest can still end up worse off together. 📄 Read-aloud
- Nash Equilibrium Explained Simply The concept that earned John Nash a Nobel Prize - a stable outcome where no player can benefit by changing their choice alone. 📄 Read-aloud
- Zero-Sum vs Non-Zero-Sum Games The important difference between situations where one side's gain is exactly the other's loss, and situations where both sides can genuinely gain or lose together. 📄 Read-aloud
- The Tragedy of the Commons Through a Game Theory Lens How the environmental economics module's tragedy of the commons is really a many-player version of the prisoner's dilemma. 📄 Read-aloud
- Game Theory & Strategic Decision-Making: Checkpoint 1 Covers what game theory studies, the prisoner's dilemma, Nash equilibrium, zero-sum vs non-zero-sum games, and the tragedy of the commons. 5 questions
- Auctions: The Economics of Bidding How different auction formats change bidder strategy - and why the format itself, not just the item, shapes what actually gets paid. 📄 Read-aloud
- Signaling: How People Prove Information Is True Why costly, hard-to-fake actions can communicate information more credibly than simply stating it - and where this shows up across everyday life. 📄 Read-aloud
- Repeated Games and Why Reputation Matters Why cooperation becomes far more likely once the same players interact more than once - and why reputation is the mechanism behind it. 📄 Read-aloud
- Game Theory in Everyday Negotiation Bringing the module's ideas together into practical negotiation habits - and why the best deals often expand the pie rather than just splitting it. 📄 Read-aloud
- Game Theory & Strategic Decision-Making: Checkpoint 2 Covers auctions and the winner's curse, signaling, repeated games and reputation, and applying game theory to everyday negotiation. 5 questions
- Coordination Games and Focal Points Why some games reward matching what everyone else does, and how people manage to coordinate without ever talking to each other. 📄 Read-aloud
- Sequential Games and Backward Induction Why thinking through a decision by working backward from the ending often reveals the smartest first move. 📄 Read-aloud
- Mixed Strategies: When Randomness Is Rational Why deliberately unpredictable behavior can be the smartest possible strategy in games where being predictable is costly. 📄 Read-aloud
- Evolutionary Game Theory and Evolutionarily Stable Strategies How game theory explains behavior that evolves over generations rather than being chosen deliberately by a reasoning player. 📄 Read-aloud
- The Ultimatum Game and the Economics of Fairness A simple bargaining game reveals that real people care about fairness, not just maximizing their own payoff. 📄 Read-aloud
- The Game of Chicken and Brinkmanship A game with two dangerous equilibria explains why parties sometimes deliberately limit their own options to win a standoff. 📄 Read-aloud
- Bayesian Games: Playing With Incomplete Information How game theory handles situations where players don't know important facts about each other, only probabilities about them. 📄 Read-aloud
- Mechanism Design: Engineering Good Outcomes How economists design rules for auctions, elections and markets so that people acting in their own interest produce good results. 📄 Read-aloud
- Matching Markets: When Price Is Not Enough How economists design systems to match students to schools, doctors to hospitals and kidney donors to patients, where prices cannot do the job. 📄 Read-aloud
- Voting Paradoxes and Arrow's Theorem Why combining individual preferences into group decisions can produce strange results, and Kenneth Arrow's famous impossibility theorem. 📄 Read-aloud
- Cheap Talk: When Words Are Free How game theory explains when costless statements can still convey useful information, and when they are ignored because incentives differ. 📄 Read-aloud