Games, Networks, and Politics
The decisions we make are always affected by the decisions of others. This course will study the different circumstances in which humans interact on a pair, community, and national scale. We will cover a wide range of topics, starting with popular models in game theory such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma and different versions of auctions. We will then progress to understanding how information and preferences can spread through different networks, focusing on how these networks are formed and taking examples from social influence and epidemic spreading. Finally, we explore decision-making in the context of politics and consider topics such as how to count votes, whether voting should be mandatory, and how to prevent voters from gaming the system.
Pre-approved Topic List
- Games in our everyday lives—studying players, actions, and strategies. What is a Nash equilibrium? Two-player games studied include the Chicken game, Prisoner’s Dilemma, and Battle of the Friends. The Cuban Missile Crisis is taken as a case study.
- Mixing and switching—mixed Nash and sub-game perfect Nash equilibria with examples including Matching Pennies and Rubinstein Bargaining. Applications to firm competition—Bertrand versus Cournot competition, and public goods games.
- Repeated games and reputation, a study of tit for tat and grim trigger. Is it optimal to forgive and forget?
- The theory of auctions—first price auctions and platform examples. A case study of eBay and Google.
- Networks: what is a network and what are they useful for? How can networks help us understand social media and the convergence of echo chambers?
- Erdős-Rényi and building networks. Modeling social influence, contagion, and public goods games on networks. Exploring the COVID-19 pandemic using the SIR disease spread model.
- The median voter theorem. Who is the median voter and how do we find them? If the median voter is the only voter that matters, then why do we have extremist candidates? The pivotal voter theorem. If the chance of having an impact is close to zero, then why do we bother voting?
- Politics and social choices. What are the different ways of making votes count? Does rank choice encourage people to vote more or less strategically? Studying the plurality rule in Westminster versus rank choice in the Republic of Ireland.
- Should we have mandatory voting? What are the advantages and disadvantages? Taking Australia as a case study. How did modern medicine emerge? When did medicine become a “profession?”