The Strategy of Everything: An Introduction to Game Theory

This course treats game theory not as a branch of mathematics to be endured, but as a lens for seeing strategic structure everywhere — from penalty kicks to climate summits, from evolutionary arms races to spectrum auctions worth billions. The intellectual arc moves from the foundational question of what makes a situation strategic, through increasingly powerful solution concepts (dominance, Nash equilibrium, subgame perfection, Bayesian equilibrium), and outward into domains that might surprise students: biology, voting theory, bargaining, and algorithmic competition. The course is designed for a genuinely diverse cohort of third-year students — economists, political scientists, psychologists, biologists, philosophers, and computer scientists — so the examples deliberately rotate across these disciplines. If you study economics, you will discover game theory in coral reefs; if you study biology, you will find it in parliamentary elections. Everyone encounters both familiar ground and exhilarating new territory. Pedagogically, the course embeds five evidence-based learning principles throughout its twelve-chapter arc. Spacing ensures that foundational concepts — Nash equilibrium, backward induction, mixed strategies, the tension between individual and collective rationality — reappear across multiple chapters with escalating sophistication, so that mastery deepens through distributed encounters rather than one-shot exposure. Interleaving deliberately mixes applications across domains within and between chapters, preventing the dangerous illusion that game theory belongs to any single discipline. Retrieval practice is woven into every chapter through predict-then-reveal moments, self-testing prompts, and interactive widgets that demand students generate answers before receiving feedback. Every abstraction is grounded in concrete examples drawn from real data — Ignacio Palacios-Huerta's penalty kick studies, Robert Axelrod's tournament results, actual spectrum auction revenues from the FCC and the Australian Communications and Media Authority. And dual coding pairs every verbal explanation with interactive visualisations: playable games, manipulable payoff matrices, evolutionary simulations, and dynamic game trees that students build and solve themselves. The twelve chapters tell a single coherent story. We begin by asking what it means to think strategically, develop formal representations and solution concepts, then progressively enrich the model by adding sequence, repetition, hidden information, and evolutionary dynamics. The final third applies the full toolkit to auctions, bargaining, voting, and real-world policy dilemmas. By the end, students should be able to identify strategic structure in novel situations, select and apply appropriate analytical tools, interpret equilibrium predictions critically, and articulate — with genuine sophistication — exactly where and why game-theoretic models break down.

12 Chapters · 100 Sources

The Strategy of Everything: An Introduction to Game Theory

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100

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