Game Theory & Strategic Decision-Making

Why do ransomware gangs honor their promises? Why do doping scandals, arms races, and group projects keep producing the same trap? Ten units on the science of interdependent decisions — from the prisoner's dilemma to the design of kidney exchanges — where the deepest results are about how cooperation survives among self-interested players.

10 Units

Early Units (Foundation)

Building Skills

Advanced Concepts

Capstone/Synthesis

Honor Among Thieves

Ransomware gangs that scrupulously honor decryption promises reveal a puzzle at the heart of strategic life: cooperation can emerge among people with every incentive to betray each other. Axelrod's tournament and tit-for-tat explain why.

2-3 weeks

Thinking Strategically

A grade game played on the reader reveals the difference between what you should never do (play a dominated strategy) and what a stable outcome looks like once nobody wants to change their mind (Nash equilibrium) — read directly from payoff tables, no derivation required.

2-3 weeks

The Dilemma Everywhere

The Prisoner's Dilemma is not a puzzle about prisoners — it is a structure that recurs in arms races, price wars, doping scandals, overfishing, and group projects. Learning to recognize the structure, and to recognize when a situation is NOT a dilemma, is the diagnostic skill this course is built around.

2-3 weeks

Meeting Without Speaking

Where do you meet a stranger in New York City if you cannot communicate a plan in advance? Schelling's classic question reveals that some equilibria are not chosen through negotiation — they are found, through shared expectation, at points that stand out from all the alternatives.

2-3 weeks

Burning the Boats

Power, in strategic terms, is not always the power to do more. Sometimes it is the power to do less — to remove your own options so completely that your opponent has no rational choice but to accommodate you. Commitment devices, brinkmanship, and the doomsday machine that failed for the simplest possible reason.

2-3 weeks

The Shadow of the Future

Two answers to the same problem — how do you make your future behavior believable when no court will enforce your promises? Schelling's answer was to remove your own options. Axelrod's answer, extended here, is to make the relationship last long enough that betrayal stops paying. Repeated games, reputation markets, and the moment repetition curdles into collusion.

2-3 weeks

The Hawk and the Dove

Every strategy this course has studied so far assumed a mind doing the choosing. This unit removes the mind. Deer that fight with antlers instead of teeth, vampire bats that share blood meals with starving neighbors, and a mathematical biologist who showed that genes can play — and win — a game without ever knowing they are playing one.

2-3 weeks

Governing the Commons

A pasture, a fishery, and an argument that shaped fifty years of environmental policy: Garrett Hardin said shared resources are doomed unless a state or a market steps in to control them. Elinor Ostrom spent decades in the field proving him wrong — Swiss alpine pastures, Maine lobster gangs, and centuries-old irrigation communities that governed themselves without either. Neither state nor market. A third way, and it actually exists.

2-3 weeks

What the Seller Knows

The used car on the lot might be fine, or it might be a lemon nobody would buy if they knew what the seller knows. Akerlof's used-car market, the diploma on your wall, and a peacock's absurd tail turn out to be the same strategic object wearing different costumes — and the propagandist's flood of information is one more player exploiting the identical gap between what one side knows and the other can only guess.

2-3 weeks

Changing the Rules

Every unit in this course has asked how a rational player should behave inside a given game. This capstone unit asks a different question: if the game keeps producing outcomes nobody wants, why treat the rules as fixed? Spectrum auctions, kidney exchanges, and school-matching systems show economists redesigning the game itself — and the course closes with the full diagnostic toolkit you now carry.

2-3 weeks

Learning Progression

This course is designed to be taken sequentially. Earlier units establish foundational concepts that later units build upon. While you can explore units in any order, following the numbered sequence provides the most coherent learning experience.