Basic Information

  • Course Code: CS6001
  • Course Name: Game Theory and Algorithmic Mechanism Design
  • Course Offered In: 2022-23 Autumn
  • Instructors: Swaprava Nath
  • Prerequisites: None
  • Difficulty (on a scale of 5): 2

Course Content

The course starts right from the basics of Game theory, and is fairly heavy in usage of mathematical notations for representing the games and related concepts. Strategies and the resulting equilibria for different types of games are covered, along with algorithms to find them if they exist. The second half of the course deals with mechanism design, which is mainly concerned with designing a resource allocation algorithm for a group of agents such that a certain utility is maximized.

A list of topics is as follows- Game Theory: a model for representing games (Normal Form Games), dominance of strategies, Nash equilibrium, mixed strategies, Perfect and Imperfect Extensive Form Games and their equilibria Mechanism Design: Arrow’s Impossibility Result, Gibbard Satterthwaite Theorem, Task sharing, Pareto Optimality, VCG mechanism, Optimal Mechanism Design

Feedback on Lectures

The lectures were pre-recorded, and available on the course website. Good lectures, and most of them are fairly short. The instructor also mentions the topics covered from the reference texts.

Feedback on Evaluations

2 Quizzes which required a lot of speed, and midsem and endsem which were easy and had sufficient time provided. The level of difficulty of the questions is not very high, especially if you cover some examples from the lectures and the reference text (MSZ)

Study Material and Resources

  • (MSZ) “Game Theory” — Michael Maschler, Eilon Solan, Shmuel Zamir, Cambridge University Press.
  • (Nar) “Game Theory and Mechanism Design” — Y. Narahari, World Scientific and IISc Press, paperback.

Follow-up Courses

CS6002

Final Takeaway

It is a good course with interesting content if you like mathematics and probability theory, and want something light (no assignments, only 2 quizzes and midsem and endsem) Also, almost all the important information about the course is available on the course website so check that out as well.