This is an upper division economics elective course in game theory. Game theory might be viewed as a set of tools for formally modeling and analyzing strategic interaction between rational agents. Critically, game theory is distinguished from microeconomics more broadly by its focus on interactions between multiple decision makers. While it is in principle straightforward to model the behavior of an individual rational decision maker — e.g., he maximizes a preference, a utility function, or a profit function, as in the consumer or producer theory of intermediate microeconomics — modeling interactions between multiple self-interested decision makers requires some additional care.

Game theory has many applications. It is ubiquitous not only in economics, business, and political science, but also in neighboring subjects such as industrial engineering and not-so-neighboring subjects like biology. In fact, game theory is such an important part of computer science that the discipline has developed its own methodologies for doing game theory that have diverged somewhat from the field’s roots in economics. My expectation is that many students in this course will go on to use game theory in areas of study not only within economics, but in some of these other areas as well.