Abbreviations

For more information about the lecture halls and seminar rooms, see our lecture room page. The names listed under "Technical Assistance" are student volunteers who will act as a contact person for technical questions of the lecturers and workshop speakers during the course or workshop.

Reasoning, games, action, and rationality

This course contains two parts. The first part will examine a number of the important foundational debates in Game Theory. For example, when will players co-operate and why? Does game theory offer recommendations on how to act in strategic situations? We will address a number of proposed answers to these questions including the main ideas behind the Theory of Moves (by Steven Brams) and Team Reasoning and Framing (by M. Bacharach). The second part will acquaint students with recent logical analyses of game-theoretic solution concepts. Preference and epistemic logics will be introduced in order to examine the question: what does it mean to be rational in a game-theoretic context? The overall goal of this course is to survey the main foundational debates in game theory and highlight how logical methods can clarify and add to these debates. The course will be self-contained -- all the necessary logics along with the important game-theoretic results and concepts will be introduced. We will assume that the students have had some previous exposure to logic course (eg. a course on first-order logic).