Game Theory -

Open Course at Yale http://oyc.yale.edu/economics/game-theory/contents/sessions.html

I’m gonna go ahead and 1-up you with MIT OpenCourseWare 14.126 Game Theory http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Economics/14-126Fall-2004/CourseHome/ 14.12 Economic Applications of Game Theory http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Economics/14-12Fall-2005/CourseHome/ 14.147 Topics in Game Theory http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Economics/14-147Spring-2005/CourseHome/ 15.040 Game Theory for Managers http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Sloan-School-of-Management/15-040Spring2004/CourseHome/

MIT open courseware rocks!

i took courses in game theory. wish i didn’t. should have taken courses in economic history or industrial development instead but GT has that intuitive appeal to it. all i have to say is that it is highly overrated. there was a lot of hype in GT when it first came out, but i think ppl are slowly realizing that beyond the basics, GT is just academic play.

^ i can agree with that - the world is a very messy place and fine-tuned utility functions, probabilities, etc. get overwhelmed by the noise as well as big events that can’t be really modeled adequately

Most Econ is academic play. I took course in game theory back in 1991. I enjoyed it but still thought it was theoretical

Most Econ is academic play. I took course in game theory back in 1991. I enjoyed it but still thought it was theoretical

Game theory can be useful when doing political economic analysis, or when studying the effect of rules and institutions on economic outcomes. Since we are now in an economic environment where the role of the state is increasing, game theory is likely to be more useful. However, you’d want to look at it the way it’s taught by institutional economists, not by the more mathematical types.

Yea Douglass North>Myerson, Maskin, & Hurwicz Schelling is a great example of how you can do great game theoretic analysis without putting it all in math terms. Take Marshall’s advice and burn the math.

seems like for practical applications outside the physical sciences - quantitative analysis is way over-rated and over-used, especially and most relevant to us in economics and finance, relative to qualitative reasoning

I love pure Economists. If a Game Theortic prediction isn’t observed in the real world, it is because the parties are playing an n-period repeated game! What till the end period to see their original prediction!

Thanks for the link storko!

Any more goodies like this? I like http://www.youtube.com/edu, lots of good stuff there

I took a PhD course in Financial Game Theory and it was brutal. Very interesting, but brutal. I was getting my masters at the time and thought it would be a cool elective. I probably spent more time in that class than all the other classes in my masters combined. I remember some problems would take me several hours to complete and they would be 10 pages long. It was a weird classroom dynamic because there were only 2 students and the professor. I had to be actively listening and engaging the entire 3 hours of class. Tons of probabilities and modeling. Just a little calculus.

hezagenius Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I took a PhD course in Financial Game Theory and > it was brutal. Very interesting, but brutal. I > was getting my masters at the time and thought it > would be a cool elective. I probably spent more > time in that class than all the other classes in > my masters combined. I remember some problems > would take me several hours to complete and they > would be 10 pages long. It was a weird classroom > dynamic because there were only 2 students and the > professor. I had to be actively listening and > engaging the entire 3 hours of class. > > Tons of probabilities and modeling. Just a little > calculus. i went through that course too. to me, it was a complete waste of time. only reason you would do that course is for an intellectual challenge. If i was smart, i would’ve taken a course in financial history instead.