Course Type: Programme Elective-I
Batch: 1st Year M.Tech-CSE
Course Credits: 04

Course Objectives

• To teach students some strategic considerations to take into account making their choices.
• To learn basic concepts of game theory.
• To apply game theoretic models to real world problems.

Pre-requisites

There are no official pre-requisites for this course.

Venue

Class Room, First Floor, Department of Computer science and Engineering

Time Slot

Monday: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Tuesday: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Wednesday: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Thursday: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Course Content

1. Introduction: games and decisions, Games Strategies, Costs and Payoff, Basic Solution Concepts.
2. Finding equilibria and Learning in Games.
3. Zero-sum games: secure strategy, Maximin, Maximax, and Minimax Regret Solvability, value of a game.
4. Normal form games: dominance, iterated dominance, Nash equilibrium. N-player games, mixed strategy nash equilibria.
5. Graphical Games: Computing Nash equilibria in Tree Graphical Games, Graphical Games and correlated Equilibria.
6. Extensive form games: subgame perfection, sequential equilibrium, Stackelberg Model of Duopoly, Buying Votes, Committee Decision-Making.
7. Bargaining: Rubinstein bargaining, Nash bargaining.
8. Repeated games: Folk theorem and Repeated prisoner’s dilemma. Tacit collusion.
9. Incomplete information games: Bayesian equilibrium, higher order beliefs.
10. Auctions and mechanism design: Basic auctions, voting, Vickrey-Clarke-Groves Auction.
11. Cryptography and Game theory: cryptographic influence on game theory and Game theoretic influence on cryptography.

Course Outcomes

Upon successful completion of the course, the students will be able to:

• CO1: Solve strategic games between two and more agents in non-cooperative scenario.
• CO2: Analyze and solve both simultaneous-moves and sequential-moves games.
• CO3: Learn different methods to solve games.

Reference Books/Text Books

1. A Course in Game Theory by M. J. Osborne & A. Rubinstein, MIT Press.
2. Algorithmic Game Theory by N. Nisan, T. Rougharden, E. Tardos and V. V. Vazirani, Cambridge University Press.
3. Game Theory and Applications by Tatsuro Ichiishi, Abraham Neyman and Yair Tauman, Elsevier.
4. Essentials of Game Theory: A Concise, Multidisciplinary Introduction by K. Leyton-Brown and Y.Shoham, Morgan & Claypool Publishers.

Other Important Material

• Concept of Game Theory [Online NPTEL Course]
• Application of Game Theory [MIT OpenCourseWare]