IE 616 – DECISION ANALYSIS AND GAME THEORY

Course offered in:

Spring 2019

Course Instructor: Prof. Veeraruna Kavitha

Prerequisites: Exposure to relevant concepts at undergraduate level and instructor consent Instructor consent is necessary for taking up this course. Also, knowledge of concepts of Probability and Optimization (covered in the two fundamental courses of the IEOR Minor Program) will make this course more smooth for you.

Course Content: Multi-agent models and Game Theory, with applications: Prisoner`s Dilemma, zero-sum and non-zero-sum games, static games, strategic form games, Nash Equilibrium. Cooperative Game Theory: Correlated strategies and equilibrium, contracts, games with communication, and Nash bargaining solution. Multi person cooperative games, Transferable utility games and their cores, Shapley value. Utility theory, Bayesian Games and Bayesian Nash equilibrium. Introduction to Mechanism Design. Simple Decision Models and Simple Decision Processes, Finite Dynamic Games, Extensive form games, Backward induction, Games with Continuous Strategy Sets, Infinite Dynamic Games.

Feedback on Lectures:

The Professor was really interested in the learning experience for the students. She made every possible effort to make you understand the concept well and have fun in the process. And thus, she was very strict regarding attendance. Manual attendance was taken as the batch size wasn’t very large. You needed to qualify for the 80% attendance policy in order to sit for the exams, although, I’m not sure to what extent she adhered to it. She used blackboard for teaching the concepts and no lecture slides were available. So, it was important to take proper notes and attend the lectures regularly. But she followed the IISC lecture series by Y. Narhari as the reference, and thus, you can refer to it as well when needed. The content is very logical and intuitive as well as quite interesting, but you might feel uncomfortable with the notations involved. But trust me, you will get comfortable with them with time and practice. She used examples of various traditional games in the field of Game Theory to explain the key concepts and also discussed the theorems and their proofs in the lectures. She also left some of the proofs as exercises and many of these appeared as questions in the quizzes/exams.

Feedback on Tutorials, Assignments and Exams: There were no tutorials or discussion-sessions for this course. Although a few practice questions and previous year papers were released by the TAs before the quizzes/exams. And atleast one TA always attended the class, so it was never a problem to get your doubts cleared. Moreover, the instructor was more than ready to address your doubts in or after the lecture. Although, I would suggest going through the reference book to revise the theory and also solving the examples or chapter-wise problems as more than often these problems turned up in the quizzes/exams.

The course evaluation consisted of two quizzes, one midsem, and one endsem. Dates for quizzes were decided with mutual consent within the lectures itself. The mid-sem was very similar to the quizzes but a bit lengthier. Any typical paper in this course consisted of some short questions based on concepts or examples discussed in class, some questions from the problems of the reference book, and one or two long questions based on very crucial topics of the course. You generally had two choices for these questions. These questions checked on how much you understood and required you to frame the problem statement mathematically, derive its solutions, and explain them.

The grading was not very harsh. The instructor was more than ready to listen to your cribs if you approached her with a proper explanation. She didn’t focus a lot on your notations and answers being entirely correct and overlooked minor errors. She focused more on your approach and how you framed it while writing your answer and that you used the relevant definitions/theorems or ideas.

Difficulty: (on a scale of 1 being very easy to 5 being very hard): 4

Grading: AA 4 AB 6 AU 2 BB 3 BC 7 CC 5 CD 2 FF 1 PP 7 S 7 W 3 Total 47

Study Material and References:

(1) Game Theory and Mechanism Design by Y Narahari (IISc Lecture Notes Series) (2) James N. Webb (2006) Game Theory: Decisions, Interaction, and Evolution

**Additional Comments & what you learnt from the course: ** Although the course promise to give you insights about both Decision making and Game Theory, the instructor mostly covered topics under the field of Game Theory, which itself consist of a lot of Decision-making analysis; but Decision Analysis with all its components of Pareto optimality, Multi-criteria decision models, and Goal programming was never taken up separately. Due to the pandemic, we didn’t have our second quiz and endsem, and some portion of the course was left too. The instructor released relevant reading material on Moodle to complete the course and also gave away some assignments on the same to account for the latter half of the evaluation. *Also the field of Game Theory is much more about just games and has multitudinous applications in fields ranging from economics, business, biology, networks, war, politics, and many more.

Review by – Anjali Yadav (anjaliyadavay3008@gmail.com)