(More) Games, Mechanisms, Rationality & Decisions

The course will treat with different aspects of and viewpoints on rationality and decision-making, trying to cover a broad range of approaches and methods ranging from techniques developed in computer sciences and mathematical economy to concepts from psychology and cognitive science.

The course is conceptually divided into four parts: Introduction to Game Theory: Strategic Game Theory; Games of the Mind (Epistemic Game Theory); Games in the Wild (Behavioral Game Theory); Decision Theory.

Initially, for students not familiar with notions and concepts of formal (strategic) game theory, an introduction to the field will be given, providing the knowledge needed for later topics.

In the first topical block, fundamental results from the field of epistemic game theory, a currently very active subdiscipline of game theory, will be introduced and discussed. Epistemic game theory treats in particular with games in which the individual and mutual knowledge of the participating players/agents is taken into account and explicitly incorporated in the models, yielding more realistic accounts of strategic interaction.

The second topical block treats with behavioral game theory, i.e., notions of game theory applied and observed in realistic scenarios, and also observations from real-life environments applied and modeled with means taken from the game theory repertoire.

The third and final topical block introduces formal decision theory, a nowadays almost classical field (mostly studied in economics and in some subdisciplines of psychology) developed to model and analyze decision-making and decision behavior in individuals, but also within groups or institutions.