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Archive of 21 lectures in introductory game theory, from a course I delivered in semester 1 down under here in NZ Feb to June 2007 .

  • I suggest you click on the "Reverse Sort Order " text/link in blue in the right hand menu bar (top right) to see clips in chronological) order
  • Each clip is about 50 minutes. Downloadable versions (see mov or mp4 link just under the on screen viewer) usually have a menu; these are mostly screen capture and coordinated audio, with some overlays of class interaction (voyeuristic, but sometimes a little slow compared to lecture style...)
  • There is a comments box below each media clip - comment away
  • The downloadable video files are typically quite large (80 to several hundred Mb) Quicktime (".mov") or .mp4 files with a larger screen size (640x480) - ok for broadband;
  • Copyright resides in the author/presenter, usually me, but sometimes someone else... (non commercial use and share-alike derivative works are ok)
    Creative Commons License
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
  • support for this open education project comes from the UC College of Business and Economics (Thanks Nigel!!) - but all errors of ommission and commission are mine! JF
Please let me know if you have any difficulties using the material or suggestions for improvements.
John Fountain

Oct
25
2007
ch4probabilityinverse inferenceuncertaintyasymmetric infosequential gamech5 Posted by John, 25-10-07 6:12am
Lecture 20, 2007
johnhappy This lecture continues our discussion and analysis of strategic interaction with asymmetric information and uncertainty. We examine the problem of adverse selection and the "lemons" problem (why is the used car you buy likely to be a "lemon"?) . Here, bad quality products drive out good quality products. Next we look at attempts to solve the lemons type problem: can uninformed buyers find tests or screens to help resolve their uncertainty? Can privately informed sellers provide signals like warranties or certification reports that buyers will believe?

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Oct
25
2007
ch4probabilityinverse inferenceuncertaintyasymmetric infosequential gamech5 Posted by John, 25-10-07 4:41am
Lecture 19, 2007
john
I like this lecture. We start reviewing and re-explaining the natural frequency & truth table ideas about basic technological and diagnostic uncertainties in the venture capitalist game. Then we sketch the game tree here, concentrating on using information sets to help us set out what the players know and don't know in the game, and what they know and don't know about what other players know and don't know..etc....Then we try to figure out : what's it reasonable to believe in a game like this? Here we use our previous ideas about player's strategies to help use our beliefs about diagnostics and technologies to help figure out what should I believe here? Naturally the answer is complicated...but the intuition is worthwhile, coz we run smack into the problem of multiple reasonable things to believe...and "bad" equilibria...all because of private information. Two examples: why men in NZ are reluctant to enter into primary care education, why career oriented women may have a tough time finding good jobs.

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Oct
25
2007
ch4probabilityinverse inferenceuncertaintyasymmetric infosequential gamech5 Posted by John, 25-10-07 4:25am
Lecture 18, 2007
johnhappyWe finish off our brief introduction to the element of surprise via mixed strategies by showing how mixed strategy Nash Equilibria can be found in in other 2x2 games. Then we start a new topic : games of imperfect and asymmetric information. Here, uncertainty remains a key feature, but different agent's have different uncertainties, or put another way, different agent's have different bits of private information that might be relevant to the game. We set up a venture capitalist example from Kreps' Microeconomics for Managers in the latter half of this lecture (for this and the next lecture)

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Oct
25
2007
ch4probabilityinverse inferenceuncertaintymixed strategysequential game Posted by John, 25-10-07 4:22am
Lecture 17, 2007
johnhappyThis lecture has two parts. The first part tests your understanding of inverse probability reasoning (we look again at the question of how much to believe a witnesses report in an accident case). The second part introduces the idea of a mixed strategy in a simple 2x2 simultaneous game that has no Nash Equilibria in pure strategies.

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Oct
25
2007
ch4probabilityinverse inferenceuncertaintysequential game Posted by John, 25-10-07 4:20am
Lecture 15, 2007
johnhappyThis is one of two lectures thinking deeply and critically about uncertainty in situations of strategic interaction. The first part of the lecture develops the operational subjective concept of probability, using the prices/odds set by the sports betting bookies at NZ's TAB to show how subjective probability, while personal, can be measured, by asking agents to "put their money where their mouth " is. The second part uses Gigerenzer's "natural frequency" method of communicating and thinking about uncertainty to explain inverse probability and Bayes theorem (no formulas please - only a "truth table" and, if you're a visual person, a graph, to develop "ballpark" boundedly rational assessments for inverse proabilities.

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Oct
25
2007
probabilityuncertaintych4 Posted by John, 25-10-07 4:16am
Lecture 13,2007
johnhappyWe start with discussion on uncertainty, probability, belief and expectation, then introduce the idea of contingent payoffs, a list of possibilities "if event A, the payoff B". Averaging out contingent payoffs with probability weighted averages. What does probability "mean"? - 3 interpretations of probability (the formalists, where probability is a mathematics, the frequentists, where probabilities count of indefinitely repeatable events, the subjectivists, where probability is a personal degree of belief)

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