Game Theory: How Cooperation and Competition Work

What you’ll learn
By the end of this course you will be able to understand and use the formal models of game theory to interpret situations of both cooperation and competition

Requirements
This course is a gentle introduction to game theory, a limited background knowledge of economics is required, also some background in science and maths would be of an advantage but the course is designed to be accessible to a broad audience
The course contains limited technical vocabulary but you will need to be familiar with basic scientific vocabulary
Description
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 come

together against the degradation of our environment?

But in strong contrast to this, the central question in the study of human evolution is why

humans are so extraordinary cooperative as compared with many other creatures. In most

primate groups, competition is the norm, but humans form vast complex systems of

cooperation.

Humans live out their lives in societies and the outcomes to those social systems and our

individual lives is largely a function of the nature of our interaction with others. A central

question of interest across the social sciences, economics, and management is this question

of how people interact with each other and the structures of cooperation and conflict that

emerge out of these.