Extensive Form Games + The Prisoners Dilemma

In class this week we went over Extensive Form Games and The Prisoners Dilemma. Extensive Form Games allow us to model more general strategic interactions where players do not necessarily make decisions with the same amount of information. The Prisoners Dilemma is a particular game that when repeated allows to be a model for reputation.

A recording of the class on Extensive Form Games is available here.

A recording of the class on the Prisoners Dilemma is available here.

Note that we did not specifically discuss the linking chapter between Extensive Form Games and The Prisoners Dilemma which is the discussion of Repeated Games more generically. Indeed, the Prisoners Dilemma is one particular example of a repeated game which is heavily studied.

Here are two notebooks that I briefly showed in class:

• A short notebook finding the Nash equilibria of the Centipede Game (when converted to a Normal Form game)
• Reproducing Robert Axelrod’s first tournament

Apologies that this post is shorter than usual (it’s really late and it’s been a very busy week) – I’ll happily write more next week if I can help clarify or give more structure to anything.