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Instructors: Jakob Willisch
Event type:
Seminar
Org-unit: Politics, Administration & International Relations
Displayed in timetable as:
Entsch. u. Spielth.
Hours per week:
3
Credits:
6,0
Note: In your exam regulations, differing credits may have been specified.
Location:
Campus der Zeppelin Universität
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
10 | 35
Priority scheme: Standard-Priorisierung
Course content:
Social sciences in general are an attempt to understand the ways in which people behave and make decisions, as individuals and in group settings. Decision and game theory provides a formal \textit{language} to describe situations of conflict and cooperation between rational decision makers. Over the past decades, decision and game theory has become an indispensable tool in the social sciences and natural sciences, especially in economics, but also in political science, international relations, sociology, law, psychology, computer sciences and biology. Its influence and success has been recognized by multiple Nobel prizes in economics. This course will introduce students to the fundamentals of decision and game theory. We cover the basics of rational choice theory, single-person decision problems with and without risk, static games, Nash equilibrium, dynamic games with complete information, backwards induction, subgame-perfect Nash equilibrium, Bayesian Nash equilibrium, etc.. We will apply all these concepts to problems in various contexts such as international relations, economics, politics and law.
Educational objective:
The objective of this course is to provide students with the basics of strategic social interaction in politics, economics, and administration. At the conceptual level the course will cover the following topics: preferences and individual choices, decision theory, normal form games, Nash equilibria, extensive form games, subgame perfect equilibria, games with incomplete and imperfect information. The focus will be to develop a practical intuition for strategic situations and solution concepts, rather than mathematical accuracy. At the substantial level, we will use these concepts to study situations of practical relevance to public policy and administration, such as the tragedy of the commons, public goods, political competition, signaling, bargaining, and lobbying.
Further information about the exams:
The exam will take about 90 minutes and will take place at the end of the course.
Mandatory literature:
Tadelis, Steven (2013): Game Theory: An Introduction. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Osborne, Martin (2003): An Introduction to Game Theory. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.
Humphreys, Macartan (2016): Political Games: Mathematical Insights on Fighting, Voting, Lying, & Other Affairs of State. W. W. Norton & Company
German: Behnke, Joachim (2013): Spiel- und Entscheidungstheorie. Baden-Baden
Further Reading: Bueno de Mesquita, Ethan (2016): Political Economy for Public Policy. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
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