Games People Play: Game Theory in Life, Business, and Beyond

Modern game theory – the scientific study of interactive, rational decision making – achieved prominence in the mid-20th century and has proven instrumental in helping us understand how and why we make decisions. Game theory plays a crucial role in our lives and provides startling insights into all endeavors in which humans cooperate or compete, including biology, computer science, politics, agriculture, and, most importantly, economics. You can see game theory at work in the interactions you engage in every day, such as an obvious “game,” like buying a car, or a less obvious one, like trying to decide where to go on a Saturday night or how you ought to dress.

Award-winning Professor Scott Stevens introduces you to the tools of game theory by exploring several classic games, each involving two players who can make one of two choices. Translating them into everyday examples, Professor Stevens shows how these games occur everywhere, from casual life to business to international diplomacy. Just as these lessons introduce you to game theory’s most important ideas, they also introduce you to many of its most important minds, like von Neumann, Nash, Arrow, Nalebuff, and Brandenberger. While game theory is rooted in mathematics, this course requires nothing more than a basic understanding of how numbers operate and interact. Each lesson features visually rich graphics that help you grasp the simple mathematical ideas underlying this fascinating field of study.

About The Great Courses

Tom Rollins, the founder of The Great Courses, was a law student at Harvard University and was facing an important exam on the U.S. Federal Rules of Evidence—an exam for which he wasn’t prepared.
Dreading the notoriously boring subject but knowing his success depended on understanding the material, Rollins obtained videotapes of 10 lectures by a noted authority on the subject, Professor Irving Younger. Rollins planted himself in front of his television late at night and put the first tape into his VCR. What he discovered changed his life.

The tapes were unlike anything Rollins had experienced in his Harvard lecture halls. Professor Younger’s lectures were outrageously insightful, impressively thorough, and engagingly witty. Most important: They hammered home the concepts in a way that made the subject both accessible and interesting. They made learning not a chore to be accomplished but an adventure to be experienced.
Rollins played all 10 hours of those lectures nearly nonstop. A few days later he passed his exam and went on to make an “A” in the course.

He never forgot the unique power of recorded lectures by a great teacher—the way that a bright mind could ignite a passion for lifelong learning. And years later, in 1990, Rollins founded The Great Courses to share that unforgettable experience with the rest of the world.

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