Popularized by movies such as "A Beautiful Mind", game theory is the mathematical modeling of strategic interaction among rational (and irrational) agents. Beyond what we call 'games' in common language, such as chess, poker, soccer, etc., it includes the modeling of conflict among nations, political campaigns, competition among firms, and trading behavior in markets such as the NYSE. How could you begin to model eBay, Google keyword auctions, and peer to peer file-sharing networks, without accounting for the incentives of the people using them? The course will provide the basics: representing games and strategies, the extensive form (which computer scientists call game trees), Bayesian games (modeling things like auctions), repeated and stochastic games, and more. We'll include a variety of examples including classic games and a few applications.

Matthew O. Jackson is the William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University and an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute and a fellow of CIFAR. Jackson's research interests include game theory, microeconomic theory, and the study of social and economic networks, on which he has published many articles and the book Social and Economic Networks. Jackson is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and his honors include the Social Choice and Welfare Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the B.E.Press Arrow Prize for Senior Economists. He has served as co-editor of Games and Economic Behavior, the Review of Economic Design, and Econometrica.

Yoav Shoham received his PhD in computer science from Yale University in 1987, and has been a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University since then. His research interests include logic-based knowledge representation, game theory, and electronic commerce. He has published numerous articles in these areas, and five books. The last one, Essentials of Game Theory (co-written with K. Leyton-Brown), covers the material in this course. Prof. Shoham has also founded several successful internet companies.

• Will I get a statement of accomplishment after completing this class?

  Yes. Students who successfully complete the class will receive a statement of accomplishment signed by the instructor.

• What is the format of the class?

  The class will consist of lecture videos, which are broken into small chunks, usually between eight and twelve minutes each. Some of these may contain integrated quiz questions. There will also be standalone quizzes that are not part of video lectures. There will be approximately two hours worth of video content per week.

• What should I know to take this class?

  You must be comfortable with mathematical thinking and rigorous arguments. Relatively little specific math is required; you should be familiar with basic probability theory (for example, you should know what a conditional probability is) and with basic calculus (for instance, taking a derivative).

https://www.coursera.org/course/gametheory