Playing for Real Coursepack Edition

Description

Playing for Real is a problem-based textbook on game theory that has been widely used at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The Coursepack Edition contains only the material necessary for a course of ten two-hour lectures plus problem classes. It comes with a disc of teaching aids including the author's own lecture presentations and two series of weekly exercise sets with answers.

• PowerPoint presentations for 10 two-hour lectures provided.
• Difficult exercises from the original book have been removed.

About the Author(s)

Ken Binmore, Emeritus Professor of Economics, University College London

Ken Binmore is a mathematician-turned-economist who has devoted his life to the theory of games and its applications in economics, evolutionary biology, psychology, and moral philosophy. He is well known for his part in designing the telecom auction that raised $35 billion for the British taxpayer, but his major research contributions are to the theory of bargaining and its testing in the laboratory. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of 12 books and some 90 research papers. He is Emeritus Professor of Economics at University College London.

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.

Reviews

"Ken Binmore is an outstanding exponent of game theory. His many books are written in a delightfully fresh and engaging style, as is this one. Enjoy!" - Robert Aumann, Center for the Study of Rationality, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2005 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences