Welcome to Game Theory II
This course will Start on May 27th.
Register NOW!
Our 4-week advanced course considers how to design interactions
between agents in order to achieve good social outcomes.
The course -- which is free and open to the public -- considers
three main topics: social choice theory (i.e., collective decision
making), mechanism design, and auctions. More specifically, 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.
This course is a follow-up to a more basic course in which we
provided the foundations to game theory, covering topics such as
representing games and strategies, the extensive form, Bayesian games,
repeated and stochastic games, and more. Although to a substantial
extent our new course stands alone, some of the previous material --
e.g., Bayesian games, Nash equilibrium, and dominant strategies -- is
needed for this more advanced course, whether picked up through our
previous course or elsewhere.
Instructors: Matthew Jackson, Kevin Leyton-Brown, Yoav Shoham
Materials
Materials: There will be four weeks of materials consisting of online videos and problem sets. We recommend that you complete the problem set for each week within that week, although the hard deadline is two weeks from the release date. On the fifth week, we will have a final exam.
Grading
Beyond the hard deadline, you will receive half-scores for any late problem sets completed before the final exam deadline. The problem sets will count for 70 percent of the grade and the final for the remaining 30 percent. For each of the assignment, the scores for only the first attempt will be stored.
Certificates of Completion
Students earning at least 70 percent of the total points will earn a certificate of completion, and those above 90 percent will receive a certificate with distinction.
Forum
We will use a Piazza forum for the advanced MOOC course. The link to the forum is https://piazza.com/open-classes/game_theory_2. If you do not already have a Piazza account, you will need to create one before joining our forum. The access code for the forum will be shown above once you register for the course.Course Timing
