Game Theory: How Cooperation and Competition Work

Partner: Udemy
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Description: As we watch the news each day, many of us ask ourselves why people can't cooperate, work together for economic prosperity and security for all, against war, why can't we come together against the degradation of our environment? But in strong contrast to this, the central question in the study of human evolution is why humans are so extraordinary cooperative as compared with many other creatures. In most primate groups, competition is the norm, but humans form vast complex systems of cooperation. Humans live out their lives in societies and the outcomes to those social systems and our individual lives is largely a function of the nature of our interaction with others. A central question of interest across the social sciences, economics, and management is this question of how people interact with each other and the structures of cooperation and conflict that emerge out of these. Of course, social interaction is a very complex phenomenon, we see people form friendships, trading partners, romantic partnerships, business compete in markets, countries go to war, the list of types of interaction between actors is almost endless. For thousands of years, we have searched for the answers to why humans cooperate or enter into conflict by looking at the nature of the individuals themselves. But there is another way of posing this question, where we look at the structure of the system wherein agents interact, and ask how does the innate structure of that system create the emergent outcomes. The study of these systems is called game theory. Game theory is the formal study of situations of interdependence between adaptive agents and the dynamics of cooperation and competition that emerge out of this. These agents may be individual people, groups, social organizations, but they may also be biological creatures, they may be technologies.
Category: Teaching & Academics > Social Science > Game Theory
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Price: 34.99
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Source: Impact
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