Back to Game Theory II: Advanced Applications
Stanford University

Game Theory II: Advanced Applications

Popularized by movies such as "A Beautiful Mind", game theory is the mathematical modeling of strategic interaction among rational (and irrational) agents. Over four weeks of lectures, this advanced course considers how to design interactions between agents in order to achieve good social outcomes. Three main topics are covered: social choice theory (i.e., collective decision making and voting systems), mechanism design, and auctions. In the first week we consider the problem of aggregating different agents' preferences, discussing voting rules and the challenges faced in collective decision making. We present some of the most important theoretical results in the area: notably, Arrow's Theorem, which proves that there is no "perfect" voting system, and also the Gibbard-Satterthwaite and Muller-Satterthwaite Theorems. We move on to consider the problem of making collective decisions when agents are self interested and can strategically misreport their preferences. We explain "mechanism design" -- a broad framework for designing interactions between self-interested agents -- and give some key theoretical results. Our third week focuses on the problem of designing mechanisms to maximize aggregate happiness across agents, and presents the powerful family of Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanisms. The course wraps up with a fourth week that considers the problem of allocating scarce resources among self-interested agents, and that provides an introduction to auction theory. You can find a full syllabus and description of the course here: http://web.stanford.edu/~jacksonm/GTOC-II-Syllabus.html There is also a predecessor course to this one, for those who want to learn or remind themselves of the basic concepts of game theory: https://www.coursera.org/learn/game-theory-1 An intro video can be found here: http://web.stanford.edu/~jacksonm/Game-Theory-2-Intro.mp4

Status: Bidding
Status: Mathematical Theory & Analysis
AdvancedCourse17 hours

Featured reviews

GL

5.0Reviewed Oct 19, 2022

V​ery interesting and challenging... I wish there were more practical/real-world examples to learn the concepts but I was very glad to take this course

BT

5.0Reviewed Aug 24, 2021

I​ have been grateful to be part of both Game Theory I and II, thank you for all this was very helpful for my career

MW

4.0Reviewed Nov 5, 2017

A lot of the important results were covered but sometimes results came out of nowhere (for example with optimal auctions and virtual valuations).

HP

5.0Reviewed Nov 6, 2020

I learned strategic thinking and how to make applied that in real world with various Game Theory methods. Thanks

AK

5.0Reviewed Jan 10, 2019

Brilliant mind-teaser, helps you form skills that will lead to logical thinking in strategic interplays between everyday events and even the more complex one.

BB

5.0Reviewed Oct 23, 2017

Great learning experience, one advice is to show the working of the solutions of the problem sets

RG

5.0Reviewed Feb 18, 2018

Excellent course, I wish it was longer to have more examples but very interesting and well taught material

BF

4.0Reviewed Aug 12, 2022

The videos are good, the assignments as well, the book recommended is especially good, but it´s unfortunate that there is no feedback on assignments.

GV

4.0Reviewed Feb 18, 2017

Great course. Nice retracing of some notions of the course Game Theory like Pareto Oprimality. Nice idea doing some examples on auctions and voting systems. Nice proofs

AA

5.0Reviewed Mar 13, 2018

Solid through the entire course, good lectures and interesting tasks. Only missing a few explanations in some of the task.

AV

4.0Reviewed Jun 4, 2020

Great course. Very relevant to a lot of problems in business. Content was overtly mathematical. More practical examples cold have been interesting to solve.

QB

4.0Reviewed Aug 22, 2022

The course covers a lot of deep and interesting topics but some concepts are just given without proper explanation and there aren't enough exercises before writing quizzes or exams.

All reviews

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