ECO 33900 - Strategies and Games in Economics

A critical introduction to applications of game theory in economics. Applications include the analysis of conflict, trust and cooperation, firms’ strategic behavior in concentrated markets, and herd behavior and panics in financial markets. We extend basic game-theoretic models to incorporate asymmetric information and mechanism-design, studying how the rules of a game or the initial distribution of information might affect equilibrium outcomes and therefore how to select optimal rules that govern interactions. Questions addressed include the design of compensation and incentive contracts; voting models and political-economic equilibria; how firms choose their financial structure; and how and why laws and constitutions are chosen to be what they are.

prereq: ECO 30000 or equivalent
3 hrs.
3 cr.