
This course will introduce you to Game Theory provide you with tools to formally analyze both static and dynamic strategic interaction among economic agents with numerous applications to practical economic problems. Our focus will be on games of complete information — i.e., environments where all relevant elements of the interaction are known to all players involved. First, you will learn how to formally represent simultaneous moves games in strategic form and how to analyze them using the notions of dominant, dominated and mixed strategies, as well as the celebrated concept of Nash equilibrium.
You will learn how to formally represent dynamic games in extensive form and how to analyze them through backward induction and using the notion of subgame perfection. Finally, you will learn how to analyze both finitely and infinitely repeated games and how to use them to investigate collusion. By the end of the course, you will be able to construct and analyze rigorous models that describe situations of conflict and cooperation among rational decision makers.
There is also an intermediate follow-up course to this one, for people already familiar with game theory: Game Theory II.
This course is part of the Program “Market Analysis”, designed in collaboration with the Department of Economics and Statistics of the University of Naples Federico II.