Strategic interaction, and designing rules that produce good outcomes.
10 topics · 15 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
The Evolution of Trust
Nicky Case · 2017
An interactive walk through Axelrod's tournament and the iterated prisoner's dilemma, showing why tit-for-tat strategies let cooperation emerge,…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage
David Gale & Lloyd S. Shapley · 1962
Proves a stable matching always exists for any set of two-sided preferences and gives a constructive procedure, deferred acceptance, that finds one…
+2 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Theory of Games and Economic Behavior
John von Neumann & Oskar Morgenstern · 1944
Founds game theory as a mathematical discipline, formalising expected-utility under risk and solving two-person zero-sum games with the minimax…
+10 more at this level
12 of 15 works
Nicky Case
An interactive walk through Axelrod's tournament and the iterated prisoner's dilemma, showing why tit-for-tat strategies let cooperation emerge, spread, and collapse under different rules of the game.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyDavid Gale & Lloyd S. Shapley
Proves a stable matching always exists for any set of two-sided preferences and gives a constructive procedure, deferred acceptance, that finds one -- the founding result of matching-market theory.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyRoger B. Myerson
Surveys mechanism design as reverse game theory, showing how the revelation principle lets a designer characterise every social-choice rule implementable once self-interested agents each hold private information.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyBen Polak (YaleCourses)
Derives game theory from played examples rather than notation, showing that most strategic mistakes come from failing to put yourself in the other player's position.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyJohn von Neumann & Oskar Morgenstern
Founds game theory as a mathematical discipline, formalising expected-utility under risk and solving two-person zero-sum games with the minimax theorem before extending the framework to coalitional n-person games.
Notes on this copyJohn F. Nash
Every finite game has at least one equilibrium point at which no player can gain by changing strategy alone, proved in barely two pages using a fixed-point theorem.
2 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyJohn F. Nash
Derives a unique solution to two-person bargaining from a small set of axioms -- symmetry, efficiency and independence of irrelevant alternatives -- rather than from any specific negotiating procedure.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyJohn F. Nash
Proves, via Kakutani's fixed-point theorem, that every finite non-cooperative game has at least one equilibrium point in mixed strategies, and develops equilibrium as the general solution concept the 1950 note only sketched.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyThomas C. Schelling
Argues that in games with more than one equilibrium, players converge on a shared 'focal point' suggested by precedent or convention rather than by strategic calculation alone.
Notes on this copyWilliam Vickrey
Shows that in a sealed-bid second-price auction, bidding one's true valuation is a dominant strategy, founding modern auction theory and explaining why first-price rules invite costly counterspeculation.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyRobert Axelrod & William D. Hamilton
Shows, via a computer tournament and an evolutionary model, that a simple reciprocal strategy, tit-for-tat, can invade a population of non-cooperators and remain stable once established.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyA. Michael Spence
Revisits how a costly, otherwise-useless signal like education lets higher-quality workers separate themselves from lower-quality ones in a market where employers cannot observe quality directly.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copy