Game Theory is centred around mathematical models of conflict and cooperation. It plays an increasingly important role in many branches of science, such as economics, biology, computer science, psychology, political science, law, and medicine. The societal relevance of Game Theory is also illustrated by the fact that quite a few game theorists have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, like 'beautiful mind’ John Nash in 1994. Nearly everyone has heard of the Prisoners' Dilemma, but what is really the issue? In these lectures, we introduce the basic concepts and examine several branches of this exciting field.

The individual lectures

1. Introduction to Game Theory (Thuijsman / 13 Jan)
We look at the basic models of strategic competition and of fair division.

2. Applications of Cooperative Game Theory: Vaccine Distribution (Musegaas / 20 Jan)
Cooperative game theory is a mathematical tool to analyze the cooperative behavior within a group of players. Musegaas will introduce this mathematical tool to you in an intuitive way. Moreover, Musegaas will illustrate to you one of the many applications of cooperative game theory, namely how it can be used for vaccine distribution. Typically cooperation between health agencies, for sharing doses of vaccine, leads to an increased total return. However, this cooperation is only plausible when this total return can be distributed in a stable/fair way. This makes cooperation a delicate matter. Musegaas will use some game theoretical concepts to show under which conditions such a cooperation is plausible and when it’s not.

3. Experimental Economics and Behavioral Game Theory (Riedl / 3 Feb)
Casual observations suggest and economic experiments have shown that 'human players' often behave differently from 'game theory players'. In contrast to the latter, the former take into account others well-being, my feel guilt and anger, and have less cognitive calculation power. In this lecture we will discuss empirical regularities of human behavior in games, will have a first glimpse into the neuorbiological basis of such behavior, and how behavioral game theory attempts to account for the deviations from 'standard' game theoretical predictions.

4. Matching Theory: Happy Marriages and Kidney Exchanges (Salvioli / 10 Feb)
In everyday life there are many situations where we face and need to solve a pairing problem, for instance matching residents to hospitals, assigning students to colleges or mapping users to servers. Matching theory is the ideal mathematical framework for dealing with such problems. In this talk Salvioli will introduce some basic concepts and results of this theory, starting from the popular stable marriage problem, and discuss how they can be applied to make kidney transplants more efficient and fair.​​

5. Reasoning about Other Minds (Perea / 17 Feb)
In this lecture Perea  will discuss how we may reason about others before we make a choice in a game. When reasoning about others we typically do not only form a belief about the opponents’ choices, but also about the opponents’ beliefs that motivate these choices. That is, in our mind we reason about the minds of the others. This type of reasoning constitutes the heart of Epistemic Game Theory.