The twofold aim of this book is to provide both a wide coverage of modern game theory and a detailed account of many of its economic applications. The book is possibly too extensive to be fully covered in a single course. However, selected parts of it could be used in a variety of alternative courses, by adapting either the focus (e.g., altering the relative emphasis on theory and applications) or the technical difficulty of the discussion (e.g., approaching the more advanced topics less formally). I have written the book with the aim of rendering these different routes to using the book reasonably easy to pursue.
The material is organized in twelve chapters. The first nine of them embody the topics that generally would be included in a standard course of game theory and economic applications. In line with my objective of providing a smooth integration of theory and applications, these nine chapters display a repeated alternation of one and the other. Thus, on the one hand, there are five theory chapters that cover in turn the basic Theoretical Framework (Chapter 1), Strategic-Form Analysis (Chapter 2), Refinements of Nash Equilibrium (Chapter 4), Incomplete Information (Chapter 6), and Repeated Interaction (Chapter 8). In each of these five chapters, the first part is devoted to “core topics,” while the more demanding discussion is gathered next under the heading of “supplementary material.” In principle, most of the core topics could be taught at an undergraduate level, whereas the supplementary material typically would be covered only in more advanced (possibly graduate) courses.