Prof Rafael Hortala-Vallve

This course is compulsory on the MSc in Political Science (Political Science and Political Economy). This course is available on the MSc in Political Science (Political Behaviour), MSc in Public Administration and Government (LSE and Peking University) and MSc in Public Policy and Administration. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

Students enrolled on the Political Science and Political Economy stream of the MSc in Political Science will be granted priority access as this is a compulsory course on the programme. Other postgraduates wanting to take the course (space permitting) require the permission of the teacher/s responsible.

Game theory provides a scientific approach to the study of social interactions which focusses on the strategic aspects of decision-making between two or more individuals or groups. This course will cover the basic elements of game theory and how they have been applied in the area of political science and political economy. The aim of the course is to provide a deeper understanding of game theoretic tools and to help you understand how these ideas have been developed and applied in the political science literature. The course will be divided into looking at static games where all players move simultaneously and the dynamic games where players move in sequence. We will also analyse simple settings where all information is known to all players (complete information) and then move to more complex settings where some information is not known to all players (incomplete information).

This course provides a combination of seminars and lectures totalling 40 hours in the Autumn Term and 2 hours in the Spring Term. There will be a reading week in Week 6 of the AT. 

Weekly problem sets to be completed and discussed in class and a two hour mock exam in week 11 of AT.

The core text for the course is M J Osborne, An Introduction to Game Theory, Oxford University Press 2004.

Exam (50%, duration: 2 hours) in the January exam period.
Problem sets (50%) in the WT Week 1.