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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.
We discuss auctions. We first distinguish two extremes: common values and private values. We hold a common value auction in class and discover the winner's curse, the winner tends to overpay. We discuss why this occurs and how to avoid it: you should bid as if you knew that your bid would win; that is, as if you knew your initial estimate of the common value was the highest. This leads you to bid much below your initial estimate. Then we d...more
Recap: Example: Minimum Cardinality Problem, Interpretation As Convex Relaxation, Interpretation Via Convex Envelope, Weighted And Asymmetric L_1 Heuristics, Regressor Selection, Sparse Signal Reconstruction, L_1-Norm Methods For Convex-Cardinality Problems Part II, Total Variation Reconstruction, Total Variation Reconstruction, TV Reconstruction, L_2 Reconstruction, Iterated Weighted L_1 Heuristic, Sparse Solution Of Linear Inequalities, ...more
We look at two settings with asymmetric information; one side of a game knows something that the other side does not. We should always interpret attempts to communicate or signal such information taking into account the incentives of the person doing the signaling. In the first setting, information is verifiable. Here, the failure explicitly to reveal information can be informative, and hence verifiable information tends to come out even w...more
