A Crash Course in Strategic Games

Strategic games deal with the analysis of interaction between rational players, where rationality is understood as utility maximization. In strategic games the players take their actions simultaneously and the utility (payoff) for each player depends on the resulting joint action. The course will focus on the basic tension between the notions of Nash equilibrium and social optimum. It will introduce various games in which these two notions differ, including prisoner's dilemma, tragedy of the commons, Cournot competition, congestion games, fair cost sharing games, and social network games. To quantify this difference the notions of the price of anarchy, price of stability and selfishness level will be introduced. We shall also discuss the concept of mixed strategies and clarify the fundamental results of John von Neumann and John Nash on the equilibria in zero-sum games and strategic games.

More info at http://phdopen.mimuw.edu.pl/index.php?page=z18w3.