NOTE: This course will be offered if the number of registered students ≥ 20.
Admission requirements
Master students
Description
Many interactions occur within and between enterprises. Sometimes the interaction is cooperative, such as when business partners successfully collaborate on a project. Other times the interaction is competitive, as exemplified by two or more firms fighting for market share. In either case, the term interdependence applies, i.e. one person’s behavior affects another person’s well-being, either positively or negatively.
Game theory is one of the outstanding intellectual advances of the last decades (with Nobel prizes in 1994, 1996, 2001, 2005, 2007, 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2017) because it treats strategic interactions between a small number of players in a systematic way. Nowadays seemingly diverse fields like corporate finance and organizational design are approached in a unified way by game theory. More broadly, game theory is applied widely in most social sciences (including anthropology, business, economics, law, psychology, and sociology) and biology. This course highlights game theory and applies it to many aspects of corporate decision making.
Course objectives
This course will examine the basic ideas of game theory and apply them to all fields in management. Themes and patterns are identified that are common to situations in all fields of management (accounting, finance, marketing, organization, strategy, supply chains, technology), like capacity to think ahead, grasp how others think and behave, commitments, threats and promises, contract design, strategies of signalling, and the emergence of cooperation.
In this course, we aim to achieve therefore three goals:
1 Provide insight into interactive situations, using a game theoretic perspective;
2 Improve your ability to characterize enterprise challenges by using game theory;
3 Enable you to develop better enterprise strategies.
Timetable
Preliminary schedule
Semester 1:
Course: November 14th – December 17th 2019
Exam: January 6th 2020, 14:15 – 17:15 hrs
Mode of instruction
6 seminars
Interactive Classes
Course Load
6 seminars
Preparation for each seminar
Team assignments and presentation
Paper
3-hour final exam
Assessment method
Assignments and Examination
Team Assignments (40%);
Exam (60%)
Blackboard
Yes, students can enroll to Blackboard one month before the start of the course.
Reading list
Gibbons, R., Game Theory for Applied Economists, Princeton University Press, 1992.
Registration
Students have to register for the course in uSis. The registration in uSis will open two months before the start of the academic year. Click here for instructions.
There is limited capacity for external students. Please contact the programme coordinator.
More information on the different types of registration can be found here.