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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Game Theory II: Advanced Applications by Stanford University

4.7
stars
623 ratings

About the Course

Popularized by movies such as "A Beautiful Mind", game theory is the mathematical modeling of strategic interaction among rational (and irrational) agents. Over four weeks of lectures, this advanced course considers how to design interactions between agents in order to achieve good social outcomes. Three main topics are covered: social choice theory (i.e., collective decision making and voting systems), mechanism design, and auctions. In the first week we consider the problem of aggregating different agents' preferences, discussing voting rules and the challenges faced in collective decision making. We present some of the most important theoretical results in the area: notably, Arrow's Theorem, which proves that there is no "perfect" voting system, and also the Gibbard-Satterthwaite and Muller-Satterthwaite Theorems. We move on to consider the problem of making collective decisions when agents are self interested and can strategically misreport their preferences. We explain "mechanism design" -- a broad framework for designing interactions between self-interested agents -- and give some key theoretical results. Our third week focuses on the problem of designing mechanisms to maximize aggregate happiness across agents, and presents the powerful family of Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanisms. The course wraps up with a fourth week that considers the problem of allocating scarce resources among self-interested agents, and that provides an introduction to auction theory. You can find a full syllabus and description of the course here: http://web.stanford.edu/~jacksonm/GTOC-II-Syllabus.html There is also a predecessor course to this one, for those who want to learn or remind themselves of the basic concepts of game theory: https://www.coursera.org/learn/game-theory-1 An intro video can be found here: http://web.stanford.edu/~jacksonm/Game-Theory-2-Intro.mp4...

Top reviews

AV

Jul 16, 2020

This was a wonderful and very mathematically intensive course, but completing all the quizzes gave a great sense of accomplishment and developed my understanding of game theory and its various facets.

LV

May 1, 2017

Very interesting! One missing thing: please write explanations for correct/incorrect questions in quizzes. In the basic course, I found them very helpful in understanding why my reasoning was wrong.

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126 - 127 of 127 Reviews for Game Theory II: Advanced Applications

By Bernd K

•

Jun 26, 2022

I'm a little disappointed. I expected more from the course. game theoretic applications are very diverse. Here I miss the economic application of the oligopoly theory. More economic applications will likely require another course. The level of difficulty is not as high as in the game theory course.

By michael g

•

Apr 30, 2023

one of the lecturers is barely able to explain the material succinctly. the other two are basically rambling and tripping over their own words trying to sound smart. material is unnecessarily repeated.