HN Academy

If you find this article interesting, Coursera's "Competitive Strategy" [1] is a pretty good introduction on the topic of game theory and how it can be used as a decision-making framework for business, I've found.

As a case study, I recommend watching this episode of "Golden Balls" [2], which shows how a player can manipulate a game outcome and defeat the natural Nash equilibria. This is a classic IMO.

[1] https://www.coursera.org/learn/competitivestrategy

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0qjK3TWZE8

⬐ dmacjam

I would like to recommend one more MOOC that covers different models (economic models, modelling people behavior, randomness, collective actions -Prisoner's dilemma, segregation models) and make you start thinking about the world in term of models.

[1] https://www.coursera.org/learn/model-thinking

⬐ kornish

If anyone is interested in this course but would prefer to read a book instead, most of this class draws from "Micromotives and Macrobehaviors" by Nobel economist Thomas Schelling. The book basically serves as a compendium of different classes of models, and explores how counterintuitive behavior of the collective can arrive from perfectly reasonable and rational individual strategies of the actors.

It kind of reminds me of the explanation of how the crowd at the Hajj crush (on the front page earlier today) behaved more like a fluid than crowd of communicating agents because the human density was so high.

⬐ nicolapede

Thanks a lot for sharing it. I have just looked it up on Amazon and found that they say something like 'before Freaknomics ...'. What is the link between the two?

⬐ oli5679

Freakonomics is a write up of several economics papers that used a statistical method called Instrumental Variables for causal analysis.

Schelling's book is a write-up of the theoretical predictions of several different game-theory models. I didn't notice much overlap between the two.