Game Theory: How Cooperation and Competition Work | Social Science Online Course by Udemy

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Game Theory: How Cooperation and Competition Work

As we watch the news each day, many of us ask ourselves why people can’t cooperate, work together for economic prosperity and security for all, against war, why can’t we cometogether against the degradation of our environment?But in strong contrast to this, the central question in the study of human evolution is whyhumans are so extraordinary cooperative as compared with many other creatures. In mostprimate groups, competition is the norm, but humans form vast complex systems ofcooperation. Humans live out their lives in societies and the outcomes to those social systems and ourindividual lives is largely a function of the nature of our interaction with others. A centralquestion of interest across the social sciences, economics, and management is this questionof how people interact with each other and the structures of cooperation and conflict thatemerge out of these. Of course, social interaction is a very complex phenomenon, we see people formfriendships, trading partners, romantic partnerships, business compete in markets, countriesgo to war, the list of types of interaction between actors is almost endless. For thousands of years, we have searched for the answers to why humans cooperate orenter into conflict by looking at the nature of the individuals themselves. But there is anotherway of posing this question, where we look at the structure of the system wherein agentsinteract, and ask how does the innate structure of that system create the emergentoutcomes. The study of these systems is called game theory. Game theory is the formal study ofsituations of interdependence between adaptive agents and the dynamics of cooperationand competition that emerge out of this. These agents may be individual people, groups, social organizations, but they may also be biological creatures, they may be technologies. The concepts of game theory provide a language to formulate, structure, analyze, andunderstand strategic interactions between agents of all kind. Since its advent during the mid 20th-century game theory has become a mainstream tool forresearchers in many areas most notably, economics, management studies, psychology, political science, anthropology, computer science and biology. However, the limitations ofclassical game theory that developed during the mid 20th century are today well known. Thus, in this course, we will introduce you to the basics of classical game theory whilemaking explicit the limitations of such models. We will build upon this basic understanding bythen introducing you to new developments within the field such as evolutionary game theoryand network game theory that try to expand this core framework. In the first section, we will take an overview of game theory, we will introduce you to themodels for representing games; the different elements involved in a game and the variousfactors that affect the nature and structure of a game being played.2. In the second section, we look at non-cooperative games. Here you will be introduced to theclassical tools of game theory used for studying competitive strategic interaction basedaround the idea of Nash equilibrium. We will illustrate the dynamics of such interactions andvarious formal rules for solving non-cooperative games.3. In the third section, we turn our attention to the theme of cooperation. We start out with ageneral discourse on the nature of social cooperation before going on to explore these ideaswithin a number of popular models, such as the social dilemma, tragedy of the commonsand public goods games; finally talking about ways for solving social dilemmas throughenabling cooperative structures.4. The last section of the course deals with how games play out over time as we look atevolutionary game theory. Here we talk about how game theory has been generalized towhole populations of agents interacting over time through an evolutionary process, to createa constantly changing dynamic as structures of cooperation rise and fall. Finally, in thissection we will talk about the new area of network game theory, that helps to model howgames take place within some context that can be understood as a network ofinterdependencies. This course is a gentle introduction to game theory and it should be accessible to all. Unlikea more traditional course in game theory, the aim of this course will not be on the formalitiesof classical game theory and solving for Nash equilibrium, but instead using this modelingframework as a tool for reasoning about the real world dynamics of cooperation andcompetition.

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