Playing for Real, Coursepack Edition: A Text on Game Theory (Paperback)

Playing for Real is a problem-based textbook on game theory that has been widely used at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. This Coursepack Edition will be particularly useful for teachers new to the subject. It contains only the material necessary for a course of ten, two-hour lectures plus problem classes and comes with a disk of teaching aids including pdf files of the author's own lecture presentations together with two series of weekly exercise sets with answers and two sample final exams with answers.

There are at least three questions a game theory book might answer: What is game theory about? How is game theory applied? Why is game theory right? Playing for Real is perhaps the only book that attempts to answer all three questions without getting heavily mathematical. Its many problems and examples are an integral part of its approach. Just as athletes take pleasure in training their bodies, there is much satisfaction to be found in training one's mind to think in a way that is simultaneously rational and creative. With all of its puzzles and paradoxes, game theory provides a magnificent mental gymnasium for this purpose. It is the author's hope that exercising on the equipment provided by this Coursepack Edition will bring the reader the same kind of pleasure that it has brought to so many other students.

Table Of Contents

Lecture 1: Getting Locked In
In this introductory lecture, a famous game called the Prisoners' Dilemma is introduced and used to illustrate how game theory can be used to clarify a variety of strategic problems. The idea of a Nash equilibrium makes its first
appearance.

Lecture 2: Backing Up
This chapter starts to explain how one can specify the rules of a game by introducing the idea of a game tree. We learn how some games can be solved by backward induction.

Lecture 3: Taking Chances
Chance moves are introduced. Bayes rule for updating conditional probabilities appears for the first time.

Lecture 4: Accounting for Tastes
We learn that a rational player in a risky situation will behave as though maximizing the expected value of a Von Neumann and Morgenstern utility function.

Lecture 5: Planning Ahead
The ideas of an extensive and strategic form of a game are consolidated. We learn the mechanics of successively deleting dominated strategies.

Lecture 6: Mixing Things Up
Rational players will sometimes need to randomoize their strategy choice to keep their opponents guessing. This chapter explains how to work with such mixed strategies.

Lecture 7: Buying Cheap and Selling Dear
This chapter is an introduction to the use of game theory in economics. Students of economics will find most topics are treated from a different angle than they have probably seem before.

Lecture 8: Repeating Yourself
Most of the games we play in real life are repeated over and over again. This makes a big difference to how they get played.

Lecture 9: Getting Together
This chapter applies game theory to bargaining.

Lecture 10: Knowing What to Believe
One of the big successes of game theory lies in its ability to handle some situations in which players have good reason to conceal information from each other.

Lecture 11: Taking Charge
This lecture is an optional extra about auctions and mechanism design. It can serve as a possible substitute for Lecture 8 or 9.