Lectures (Video)
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Putting yourselves into other people's shoes
- 3. Iterative deletion and the median-voter theorem
- 4. Best responses in soccer and business partnerships
- 5. Nash equilibrium: bad fashion and bank runs
- 6. Nash equilibrium: dating and Cournot
- 7. Nash equilibrium: shopping, standing and voting on a line
- 8. Nash equilibrium: location, segregation and randomization
- 9. Mixed strategies in theory and tennis
- 10. Mixed strategies in baseball, dating and paying your taxes
- 11. Evolutionary stability: cooperation, mutation, and equilibrium
- 12. Evolutionary stability: social convention, aggression, and cycles
- 13. Sequential games: moral hazard, incentives, and hungry lions
- 14. Backward induction: commitment, spies, and first-mover
- 15. Backward induction: chess, strategies, and credible threats
- 16. Backward induction: reputation and duels
- 17. Backward induction: ultimatums and bargaining
- 18. Imperfect information: information sets and sub-game
- 19. Subgame perfect equilibrium: matchmaking and strategic investments
- 20. Subgame perfect equilibrium: wars of attrition
- 21. Repeated games: cooperation vs. the end game
- 22. Repeated games: cheating, punishment, and outsourcing
- 23. Asymmetric information: silence, signaling and suffering education
- 24. Asymmetric information: auctions and the winner's curse
Game Theory - Lecture 20
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Lecture 20 - Subgame perfect equilibrium: wars of attrition
We first play and then analyze wars of attrition; the games that afflict trench warfare, strikes, and businesses in some competitive settings. We find long and damaging fights can occur in class in these games even when the prizes are small in relation to the accumulated costs. These could be caused by irrationality or by players' having other goals like pride or reputation. But we argue that long, costly fights should be expected in these games even if everyone is rational and has standard goals. We show this first in a two-period version of the game and then in a potentially infinite version. There are equilibria in which the game ends fast without a fight, but there are also equilibria that can involve long fights. The only good news is that, the longer the fight and the higher the cost of fighting, the lower is the probability of such a fight.
Prof. Ben Polak
ECON 159 Game Theory, Fall 2007 (Yale University: Open Yale) http://oyc.yale.edu Date accessed: 2009-01-15 License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA |
Lecture Material
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