Economics, Literature and Scepticism

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I am a PhD student in Economics. I am originally from South Africa and plan to return there after my PhD. I completed my M. Comm in Economics and my MA In Creative Writing (Poetry) at the University of Cape Town, where I worked as a lecturer before starting my PhD.

Thursday, August 05, 2010

Cooperation and Competition Lectures

Posted by Simon Halliday | Thursday, August 05, 2010 | Category: |

I am slowly uploading my lectures from Cooperation and Competition (EC2007S) at the University of Cape Town to
Cooperation and Competition - 1st Lecture 26 July 2010 from Simon Halliday on Vimeo.
">vimeo, a good video sharing site.  You can see the "channel" for the videos here: Cooperation and Competition.  You can subscribe to the RSS feed of the channel if you're interested.   Cooperation and Competition is a course in introductory game theory using the textbook Games of Strategy by Dixit, Skeath and Reiley (which I mentioned recently in this post).  The videos are a combination of a video of me and a screencast - that is a video and audio capture of the slides that I use for my lectures.  The book is great because it covers all the basics of game theory with many good intuitions.  I try to make the content even more intuitive and accessible in my lectures, brushing over a bit of stuff initially though defining it more clearly later.  I only lecture six weeks of the course, going quite in depth into the ideas and applications of strategic form games, games with many players and extensive form games.

I have embedded the first lecture below.  I was quite fortunate to have Helen Zille and Patricia De Lille declare an agreement to cooperate the day before the course started, which meant that I could use that as a starting point for a discussion of agents agreeing to cooperate in political games.  This meant that students could see from the get-go that game theory offers all kinds of interesting insights into various aspects of interactions outside of its immediate purview, that is outside of economics (I'd rather not be accused of 'economics imperialism' here, the idea is for students to see that there are many applications of game theory and then later to develop a more nuanced view of the limits and extensions to the theory once they have a better understanding).

Cooperation and Competition - 1st Lecture 26 July 2010 from Simon Halliday on Vimeo.

Currently have 1 comments:

  1. Brilliant! I'm looking forward to watching these. (I might have to ask you for dvds....)