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This course introduces students to rational agent theory applied to political science. It focuses on individual choice and group choice. It looks at models of individuals’ voting behavior, candidates’ behavior, and the group choice. The emphasis is analytical, though students are not expected to have a background in formal mathematics. The course covers some of the major topics studied in Positive Political Theory: The aggregation of preferences from individual preferences to social preferences, voting, electoral competition and electoral systems, legislature voting and separation of powers. This course will familiarize the students with the analytical tools of decision theory, social choice theory and game theory. At the same time, the students will learn to systematically organize and express their thoughts and insights about political questions with the precision and logical rigor of scientific language.
Next semester offered: Fall 2019 
Increasingly, political scientists as well as economists are using game theory to analyze strategic interactions across many different settings. This course aims to give students a deep technical understanding of the most relevant concepts of game theory, and how these concepts have been applied to the study of political and economic phenomena.
Game theory is a systematic study of strategic situations. It is a theory that helps us analyze economic and political strategic issues, such as behavior of individuals in a group, competition among firms in a market, platform choices of political candidates, and so on. We will develop the basic concepts and results of game theory, including simultaneous and sequential move games, repeated games and games with incomplete information. The objective of the course is to enable the student to analyze strategic situations on his/her own engaging in critical thinking and quantitative analysis. The emphasis of the course will be quantitative, so familiarity with mathematical formalism is desirable. During the semester students will learn to use quantitative analysis for different strategic problems through a set of assignments. These assignments will require students to apply the quantitative solving techniques that they are learning about in class. Similarly, students will be tested with midterm and final exams that require quantitative reasoning. The course is recommended for students majoring in Political Science, Economics, Public Policy, etc: this is a good course for students who are comfortable with mathematical modeling and want to learn more about incentives in strategic environments, students who plan to go to Law School, grad school in Public Policy, Political Science, etc … or for who just want to learn for the sake of learning!
Next semester offered: Spring 2020
This course is designed to provide a thorough introduction to non-cooperative game theory for political science PhD students. The objective of the course is to cover the basic concepts of non-cooperative game theory rigorously while allowing plenty of time to discuss applications in many different fields of political science an economics. The course will not cover social choice theory or cooperative game theory.
Next semester offered: Spring 2020
This course is designed for students who have already taken Game Theory I (Poli 789), but who desire greater proficiency in the more advanced topics. The course focuses on canonical games of incomplete information that are used widely in all fields of political science and political economy, e.g. signaling games, cheap-talk games, and wars of attrition. It will also introduce students to theoretical topics that are beginning to play a prominent role in recent contributions to the political science literature, e.g. principal agents models and Quantal Response equilibrium. The course is suitable for students who, in the course of their own research, wish to evaluate, critique, or otherwise engage formal-theoretic work, as well as those who anticipate using game theoretic techniques themselves. Questions concerning the interpretation of models and the evaluation of models will discussed extensively.
Next semester offered: Fall 2020
This course is designed for students who have already taken Game Theory I (Poli 789), but who desire greater proficiency in the more advanced topics. The course focuses on canonical games of incomplete information that are used widely in all fields of political science and political economy, e.g. signaling games, cheap-talk games, and wars of attrition. It will also introduce students to theoretical topics that are beginning to play a prominent role in recent contributions to the political science literature, e.g. principal agents models and Quantal Response equilibrium. The course is suitable for students who, in the course of their own research, wish to evaluate, critique, or otherwise engage formal-theoretic work, as well as those who anticipate using game theoretic techniques themselves. Questions concerning the interpretation of models and the evaluation of models will discussed extensively.