Lecture 2 - Putting Yourselves into Other People's Shoes

1:08:48 Free

At the start of the lecture, we introduce the "formal ingredients" of a game: the players, their strategies and their payoffs. Then we return to the main lessons from last time: not playing a dominated strategy; and putting ourselves into others' shoes. We apply these first to defending the Roman Empire against Hannibal; and then to picking a number in the game from last time. We learn that, when you put yourself in someone else's shoes, you should consider not only their goals, but also how sophisticated are they (are they rational?), and how much do they know about you (do they know that you are rational?). We introduce a new idea: the iterative deletion of dominated strategies. Finally, we discuss the difference between something being known and it being commonly known.

📑 Lecture Chapters:

Recap of Previous Lecture: Prisoners' Dilemma and Payoffs [00:00:00]
The Formal Ingredients of a Game [00:06:47]
Weakly Dominant Strategies [00:16:01]
Rationality and Common Knowledge [00:35:29]
Common Knowledge vs. Mutual Knowledge [01:05:37]

Source: Ben Polak, Game Theory (Yale University: Open Yale Courses). Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

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ECON 159: Game Theory

This course is an introduction to game theory and strategic thinking. Ideas such as dominance, backward induction, Nash equilibrium, evolutionary stability, commitment, credibility, asymmetric information, adverse selection, and signaling are discussed and applied to games played in class and to examples drawn from economics, politics, the movies, and elsewhere.