An Introduction to Game Theory

Game Theory is not as trivial as it sounds, but it is sure is a lot of fun!

Photo by Jose Castillo on Unsplash

For one of your Ride On writers, his favourite economics courses as an undergrad and as an M.A. student were macroeconomics-oriented. However, that preference changed after he started working at the Canadian Competition Bureau in 1999. His work there on abuse of dominance cases (and later merger and cartel cases) led him to absolutely love microeconomics because studying strategic human interaction — and strategic interaction between businesses and governments operated by humans — thrilled him to no end! This is why he likes to tell people that, contrary to popular opinion, economics is not all about money.

His love for the study of strategic interaction is also why his favourite topic to teach is Game Theory, and he found his students tended to find it the most interesting, too, even when they otherwise did not care for economics. It is truly thrilling for him to think logically about how a person, business, or government will react to their counterparts, based on how they expect those counterparts to react to that reaction.

In fact, he got his job as an Assistant Professor in a previous life largely because of his teaching demonstration on Game Theory, so that is yet another reason why this topic means so much to him.

Over the coming weeks, we will focus more on strategic interaction in this newsletter, so we feel it is valuable to first devote an issue to introducing Game Theory so everyone is on the same page regardless of background. So that is what we will do today, and we hope you all react well to it!

But before moving on, we invite you to please consider a paid subscription to this newsletter, because although economics is not all about money, it would still help us in terms of affording the time and other resources necessary to conduct this research. Regardless, we are happy you are here!