Introduction to Game Theory (POLS 513)

Professors: John Patty and Maggie Penn

Course Description and Syllabus

Course Description.  This course is an introduction to social choice theory and noncooperative game theory.

Course Syllabi. The course syllabus for POLS 513 is located here.

Lectures. In Spring 2021, the course will be taught remotely with synchronous class sessions from 1-2:15pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Supplemental Readings

  • Apportionment Paradoxes and the Balinski-Young Theorem
    • Balinski & Young, Fair Representation: Meeting the Ideal of One Man, One Vote, Yale University Press, 1982.
  • The Discursive Dilemma (Judgment Aggregation) and Deliberation
    • List & Pettit, “Aggregating Sets of Judgments: An Impossibility Result,” Economics and Philosophy, 2002.
    • Pigozzi, “Belief merging and the discursive dilemma: an argument-based account to paradoxes of judgment aggregation,” Synthese, 2006.
    • Pettit, “Deliberative Democracy and the Discursive Dilemma,” Philosophical Issues, 2001.
    • Patty & Penn, “A Social Choice Theory of Legitimacy,” Social Choice and Welfare, 2011.
    • Miller, “Deliberative Democracy and Social Choice,” Political Studies, 1992.
  • Matching
    • Gale &Shapley, “College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage,” The American Mathematical Monthly, 1962.
    • Roth, “The College Admissions Problem is Not Equivalent to the Marriage Problem,” Journal of Economic Theory, 1985.
    • Roth, “Stability and Polarization of Interests in Job Matching,” Econometrica, 1984.
  • Networks, Clustering, “Big Data”
    • Boldi & Vigna, “Axioms for Centrality,” Internet Mathematics, 2014.
    • Kleinberg, “An Impossibility Theorem for Clustering,” in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2003.
    • Altman & Tennenholtz, “Ranking Systems: The PageRank Axioms,” in Proceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, 2005.
    • Cohen & Zohar, “An Axiomatic Approach to Link Prediction,” in Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2015.
    • Della Penna & Reid, “Crowd & Prejudice: An Impossibility Theorem for Crowd Labelling without a Gold Standard,” Collective Intelligence: Proceedings, 2012.
  • Optimal Voting Schemes
    • Apesteguia, Ballester, & Ferrer, “On the Justice of Decision Rules,” Review of Economic Studies, 2011.
    • Casella, “Storable Votes,” Games and Economic Behavior, 2005.
    • Dasgupta & Maskin, “On the robustness of majority rule,” Journal of the European Economic Association, 2008. 4
    • Balinski & Laraki, “Judge: Don’t Vote!,” Operations Research, 2014.
    • Barbera & Jackson, “On the Weights of Nations: Assigning Voting Weights in a Heterogeneous Union,” Journal of Political Economy, 2006.
  • Behavioral Choice Theory
    • Ambrus & Rozen, “Rationalising Choice with Multi-self Models,” The Economic Journal, 2014.
    • Cherepanov, Feddersen & Sandroni, “Revealed preferences and aspirations in warm glow theory,” Economic Theory, (2013).
    • Cherepanov, Feddersen & Sandroni, “Rationalization,” Theoretical Economics, (2013).
    • Tutic, “Revealed Norm Obedience,” ´ Social Choice and Welfare, (2015).
    • Jackson & Yariv, “Collective Dynamic Choice: The Necessity of Time Inconsistency,” American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 2015.
  • Inequality, Polarization, and Measures of Welfare
    • Fleurbaey & Tungodden, “The tyranny of non-aggregation versus the tyranny of aggregation in social choices: a real dilemma,” Economic Theory, 2009.
    • Duclos, Esteban, & Ray, “Polarization: Concepts, Measurement, Estimation,” Econometrica, 2004.
    • Esteban & Ray, “On the Measurement of Polarization,” Econometrica, 1994.
    • Foster, “Inequality Measurement,” In Fair Allocation: Proceedings of Symposia in Applied Mathematics, 1985.
    • Dalton, “The Measurement of the Inequality of Incomes,” The Economic Journal, 1920.
    • Atkinson, Anthony B, “On the Measurement of Inequality,” Journal of Economic Theory, 1970.
    • Gini, “Measurement of Inequality of Incomes,” The Economic Journal, 1921.
    • Sen, “Poverty, Inequality and Unemployment: Some Conceptual Issues in Measurement,” Economic and Political Weekly, 1973.
    • Sen, “Informational Bases of Alternative Welfare Approaches: Aggregation and Income Distribution,” Journal of Public Economics, 1974.
    • Sen, “Poverty: An Ordinal Approach to Measurement,” Econometrica, 1976.