FSEM 100M4 | Game Theory

gametheory

THIS COURSE HAS CURRENTLY FILLED FOR FALL 2025.

When you play a game, like poker or chess, the outcome depends on what you do, but it also depends on what the other players do. Many real-life situations can also be characterized this way. Interactions between employers and employees, competing companies, parties to a contract, and nations in conflict are interactions in which each side is trying to make the choices that are best for them, but the outcome also depends on the choices that others make. Game theory studies these types of interactions.

Unlike games like poker, where one person’s gain is another person’s loss, many real-life games are situations in which both sides can gain. Consequently, game theory is more often about understanding how people can cooperate with each other than it is about understanding how one person can beat another. One of the primary tasks of game theory is understanding how things like repeated interaction, or laws, or social norms of behavior can promote cooperation and why they sometimes fail to do so.

Not surprisingly, game theory Is used in many disciplines: mathematics, economics, law, political science, business, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. Biologists have even used game theory in models of evolution. So, if you are interested any of these topics or just interested in thinking about how life is like a game this may be the class for you.

 

Photo of Brad Hansen, Professor of Economics

Brad Hansen, Professor of Economics

My name is Bradley A. Hansen, and I am a professor of economics here at the University of Mary Washington, where I have taught since 1995. I’m originally from south-central Nebraska but moved to San Francisco when I was ten. My senior year of high school we moved from San Francisco to Port Angeles, Washington, where a high school guidance counselor told me that I had to take the SAT. Neither my parents nor their parents had been to college, and I had not given college any serious thought before that. I ended up going to The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where I fell in love with college. I have been a student or a professor ever since. I went on to earn an M.Sc. in Economic History from the London School of Economics and Ph.D. in Economics from Washington University in St. Louis, where I was fortunate enough to study with the Nobel Prize winning economist Douglass North. I wanted to study with North because of his work on the role of institutions in economic history. Institutions are things like laws and social norms that influence the choices people make. North referred to them as “the rules of the game” and argued that they were the key to understanding economic performance throughout history. Consequently, thinking about life as a game has been central to my own research, most of which has focused on the relationship between institutions and credit markets. My most recent book, was Bankrupt in America: A History of Debtors, Their Creditors, and the Law in the Twentieth Century, coauthored with my wife Mary Eschelbach Hansen, who is also an economist. In addition to bankruptcy, I have published research on the Panic of 1907, the history of trust companies, the opium market in Iran, race and gender discrimination in teaching salaries, adoption from foster care, and the Wizard of Oz. People sometimes ask if I like my job. I tell them that I feel like I won the lottery; I get paid to read, and write, and talk about things that I find interesting.
By the way, I won the lottery of life a second time when I met my wife, Mary, at a seminar in Munich in 1997. We live a few blocks from UMW and there is a good chance you might run into us some afternoon walking our dog Lyra on campus. Lyra thinks campus is a great place to walk because there are usually people who want to pet her and tell her what a pretty puppy she is.