Introducing strategies with matching pennies

Today we mainly talked about what a strategy was: defining it as a way of picking actions. A recording of this class is available here

We did this by pairing up and playing two different games:

1. The traditional matching pennies game defined by the two payoff matrices: \(A=\begin{pmatrix}1 & -1\\-1 & 1\end{pmatrix}\) and \(A=-B\).
2. The modification of matching pennies which is the game defined by the two payoff matrices: \(A=\begin{pmatrix}2 & -2\\-1 & 1\end{pmatrix}\) and \(A=-B\).

We mainly spoke about what strategies we were playing:

• Some flipped a coin which corresponds to \(\sigma=(1/2, 1/2)\). We discussed how this did not necessarily make sense in the second game.
• Some tried to create a sequence of plays that manipulated their opponent.

I finished early (because I’m an idiot – and looking at past years’ class logs this seems to be a class where I make this mistake…) so I did not talk much about the formal definitions. We will start with that on Friday.

Reminder: don’t forget to form groups and keep an eye on the individual quizzes. All of this you should be able to do on learning central.