Meets Mondays and Wednesdays, 12:30 - 1:45, in McClelland 130.
Exercise and review session meets Mondays, 5:30 - 6:30, in McClelland 130.

Professor: Mark Walker.
Office hours: Wednesday 2:15 to 3:00, McClelland 401G
Also by appointment: mwalker@arizona.edu

Teaching Assistant: Bill Janss
Office hours: Tuesday 2:00 to 3:00, McClelland 401X
Also by appointment: wpjanss@u.arizona.edu

Textbook: P. Dutta: Strategies and Games, MIT Press.
You'll also find it helpful to read Roger McCain's introduction to game theory.

Optional course materials will regularly be made available for purchase at the Harvill Copy Center, in Room 137 of the Harvill Building. These will include such things as lecture notes, solutions to exercises and exams, optional additional exercises, etc. The total cost of all these optional items, over the course of the semester, will be less than ten dollars.

I expect you to have an email account and to check it regularly. I'll often make course announcements by email, and otherwise communicate with everyone in the class via email. Moreover, you'll find it much easier to communicate with me or with the TA by email than by phone.

Course description

Where decision theory studies decision making by a single decision-maker (an individual, a firm, a single government, etc.), game theory is concerned with interaction among multiple decision-makers -- situations in which the outcome of my own decision depends upon what others do as well as upon what I do. Game theoretic methods have become central to economic analysis in recent years. We will use game theory to study bargaining, competition in markets with only a few large firms, arbitration procedures, contracts between agents and their "principals," employee compensation arrangements, the value of reputation, strategic voting, competition among political parties, and other economic and political subjects.

Exercises, Quizzes, Exams, and Grading:

There will be two mid-term exams and a comprehensive final exam. The quizzes are one unit, each mid-term exam is one unit, and the final exam is two units. Your course grade will be the average of your best three grades from among those five units. In other words, your worst two grades will be discarded. (An example: Quizzes B; Mid-term exams F and B; Final exam C. The F and one C are discarded, leaving you with two Bs and a C, and your course grade is therefore a B-. If the Bs and the C are very high ones, your grade is a B; if all are very low, it might be a C+. But only these three grades are counted.)

ExamDates:

First Midterm Exam Grade Distribution (after the retake):

   Grade Points #Exams   (Each of the four problems was worth 20 points.)
      A   71-80   12
      B   61-70   14
      C   51-60    5
      D   45-50    1
      F    0-44    5
                  37 exams

Second Midterm Exam Grade Distribution (after the retake):

   Grade Points #Exams   (Problems worth 15,20,20,20 points.)
      A   65-75    4
      B   55-64   11
      C   45-54   13
      D   35-44    6
      F    0-34    2
                  36 exams

Quizzes

The scoring of the quizzes is as follows:

4: Good
3: Mostly correct
2: Some things correct, some incorrect
1: Mostly incorrect
0: Nothing answered correctly

The following quizzes and quiz solutions are available by clicking on them. The remaining quiz solutions can be found as exercise solutions.

Quiz #1
Quiz #1 Solution
Quiz #2
Quiz #2 Solution
Quiz #5
Quiz #5 Solution

Items At Harvill Copy Center

In-Class Games

Some Interesting Game Theory Links

• Roger McCain's Game Theory: An Introductory Sketch, a very nicely done introduction to most of the essential ideas in game theory.
• Paul Walker's excellent Chronology of Game Theory and bibliographic notes.
• Michael Carter's compendium of books about game theory, including books that apply game theory to economics, political science, law, biology, evolution, and decision-making in business.
• Sylvia Nasar's NY Times article about John Nash when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. A fascinating, emotional story. Her subsequent book about Nash, A Beautiful Mind, is also excellent.
• An interactive repeated Prisoners' Dilemma game from Serendip, the nom de chippe of a group of people at Bryn Mawr College.
• How long will it take you to beat the computer? Here's a very nice Hex website, where you can play and read about the game "Hex," also called "Nash." It's the game invented by John Nash in 1948 when he was a graduate student in Princeton's math department, at about the same time as he thought of the idea now known as Nash equilibrium. Sylvia Nasar describes how the game became the rage in Princeton's math department.
• David Levine's Game Theory and Economics Page, which contains (among other things) a Zero-Sum-Game Solver , a neat little tool that allows you to enter the payoffs of a two-person zero-sum game, and then it calculates an equilibrium mixed strategy for the Column player. Transpose the payoffs to get the Row player's mixed strategy.
• The Monty Hall Problem: A huge number of websites ... just do a search for "Monty Hall" and you'll get lots of hits. Some of the best are John Upper's demo (with great sound effects!) for his Queen's University philosophy course (click on "The Demo"; the page also has some interesting discussion of the problem); David Little's also cool demo and explanation for his UC San Diego math course in cryptography (this one shows you the total wins and losses by everyone who's ever played the demo, using either the Stay strategy or the Switch strategy); a simulation, also by David Little, which allows you to simulate a large number of plays, with either strategy, and under two alternative rules for Monty to follow; and both a demo and a simulation provided by the Shodor Education Foundation (the simulation allows for an arbitrary number of doors, which changes the probabilities in a revealing way).

mwalker@arizona.edu Mark Walker's Home Page