Strategic Econ

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Welcome to strategicecon.com, a space for mutlimedia resources relevant to learning about game theory at an introductory level.

The organizing concept is that of a virtual textbook, open to the world...but think beyond "text"book to include audio, and animated (and eventually interactive) visual as well as text. The "media" includes edited

full lectures (all 23 for 2007, new and growing now in 2008 our term down under is Feb to June)
short screen capture audio/video designed to explain key ideas (eg how to analyze a sequential game using a 2x2 game tree, dominance reasoning in the prisoner's dilemma, Bayes theorem using Gigerenzer's "natural frequency" methods and logical truth tables, iterated dominance reasoning, alternating offer bargaining and backward induction, etc ..) ,
tutorial type explanations to exam questions and suggestions for homework from lectures - linked to Dixit and Skeath's,Games of Strategy, Second Edition the text for my course - check tags in the right hand menu's on many pages containing entries like ds ch# in right hand menu bar to link chapter content in Dixit and Skeath to relevant lectures, or homework or tests
many interesting full lectures, seminars and public talks where strategic reasoning ius used. (eg Thomas Schelling's Nobel Prize acceptance speech)

The video clips here are NOT your standard digital conversion of a film of class lecture taken from the back of the room. I've tried to do a lot of "intelligent editing" of my class material, including chapter markers in the downloads for easy navigation , finding and eliminating errors in exposition , making sure the slides and pointer tool are clear . I'm always surprised at the great acaqdemic video material on the web at places like Princeton Stanford MIT etc...great talks, great speakers, professional filming with high tech cameras, great slides...but nobody seems to realize that screen capture of the slides is easy and is really what people want to look at! I'm not Brad Pitt or Clive Owen so the clips on this site are captured from the slides on the computer screen -- occasionally when I interact with students in classroom games (this happens a lot in my class) I'll overlay the filming of this interaction to give some animatioed flavour to the lecture, but by and large it's animated slides straight from the screen with audio commentary. .....(you see Clive Owen and Brad Pitt can't explain important and sometimes complex strategic concepts with their voice and overheads as well as I can...so that's what you get! Lots of great audio and coordinated screen shots.) PLUS, my slides are - i'm modest here - works of art. My students are second years, they don't need or want training in economics or math, but they're good at logical reasoning. I help them out with colour in our payoff matrices and game trees a LOT. I think you'll like it. I have also tried to collect in one place, for easy online (browser) viewing, and reader discussion and comment, some very interesting podcats and webcasts on things strategic - eg Thomas Schelling's wonderful Nobel prize acceptance speech on nuclear deterrence or Ted Bergstrom's fascinating introduction to evolutionary game theory from a 1995 visit to my home university. Please let me know of others you think should be here.

I've taught this course for 7 years now and use Dixit and Skeath Games of Strategy 2nd edition as the basic text., but as the years have gone by I find myself using quite a range of additional material from other texts and websites. I've tried to organize tags around their chapter numbers for ease of reference - but it's not a 1-1 correspondence. Click here for info on texts I use and pedagogy

Creative Commons educational licensing makes the public use and reuse of these resources possible (without time consuming and costly, if not prohibitive, permission requests and transactions ). I subscribe wholeheartedly to the philosophy of Boldrin and Levine in their book Against Intellectual Monopoly site and on their blog site. - so if you can get some use out of these clips, go for it.