Chevron Left
Back to Game Theory

Learner Reviews & Feedback for Game Theory by Stanford University

4.6
stars
4,531 ratings

About the Course

Popularized by movies such as "A Beautiful Mind," game theory is the mathematical modeling of strategic interaction among rational (and irrational) agents. Beyond what we call `games' in common language, such as chess, poker, soccer, etc., it includes the modeling of conflict among nations, political campaigns, competition among firms, and trading behavior in markets such as the NYSE. How could you begin to model keyword auctions, and peer to peer file-sharing networks, without accounting for the incentives of the people using them? The course will provide the basics: representing games and strategies, the extensive form (which computer scientists call game trees), Bayesian games (modeling things like auctions), repeated and stochastic games, and more. We'll include a variety of examples including classic games and a few applications. You can find a full syllabus and description of the course here: http://web.stanford.edu/~jacksonm/GTOC-Syllabus.html There is also an advanced follow-up course to this one, for people already familiar with game theory: https://www.coursera.org/learn/gametheory2/ You can find an introductory video here: http://web.stanford.edu/~jacksonm/Intro_Networks.mp4...

Top reviews

WY

May 16, 2017

Great ! Interesting and abound at the same time. Hope Professors will clarify the strategic utility function more clearly because it's hard for students with poor math basic(forget most><) right now!

SC

Feb 7, 2022

I would have preferred a more mathematically rigorous treatment of the subject. Nevertheless, this was a great course — the instructors expounded all concepts with exceptional clarity and engagement.

Filter by:

826 - 850 of 910 Reviews for Game Theory

By Sam D E

Jul 6, 2022

Whole lot of logic

By Surya R

Nov 9, 2017

More coding please

By Subham S

Sep 1, 2017

awesome experience

By Antariksha M

Sep 8, 2019

Great Learning

By Sarotree P

Mar 10, 2018

good content

By Marcela

Sep 29, 2017

Good course.

By Peter Z

Feb 15, 2017

Good Course

By Jukka A

Nov 30, 2021

I enjoyed!

By Vandana B

Jul 30, 2021

Xperience

By 1089

Sep 24, 2016

Not bad!

By Juan C

Sep 30, 2019

Great

By 李怡

Jul 12, 2017

烧脑,

By amadie g

Sep 20, 2021

ok

By Andrew Z

May 19, 2018

This could be a good course but some of the instruction is severely lacking. One of the instructors really seems to be phoning it in... in one module he provides two videos, where one is the exact same as the other except an additional minute of material. In another he teaches the exact same material as a different instructor (same slides and all).

Be prepared to spend more time on YouTube watching videos than on the lectures here. After the first few weeks the lectures simply do not prepare you to answer the problem sets (which often contain grammatically confused questions which may or may not change the answer).

All in all the material is very interesting and two of the instructors do a very good job explaining mathematical notation. I would say it would be very helpful to have an understanding of set theory and mathematical notation... there is very little heavy math required. If you understand a few calculus concepts (like limits) the number crunching portion isn't very taxing.

By Arthur S

Sep 18, 2019

Not a bad course. I enjoyed a lot of the content but personally I work best with many practice examples to build an intuition of the concepts. This was unfortunately lacking across all the weeks in my opinion, several different topics were covered each week with each having only one or two practice examples.

As a result I think that I completed many of the weeks without having a deep understanding of a lot of the content. The areas that I did have a good understanding of were supplemented by external resources on youtube, quora etc. These explained the concepts in a more intuitive way than digging into the algebra which much of this course is.

I think that if more practice examples had been provided as a supplement or if more in video quizzes and longer test sets were present I would have given this a four or five but I was not blown away by the course in it's current iteration.

By Mattias G

Jun 10, 2020

I attended Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course recently here on Coursera and thought it was really brilliant. Thought this concept of online learning is really promising and good way for free education at ones own initiative. I had hoped that this course in Game Theory would offer the same experience. But unfortunately I must say that I had expected a better experience. To learn it is required a lot of repetition with examples that are easy to follow. I think that is the missing point in this course in comparison to Andrew Ng's course. All credit to the three professor lecturers who have prepared the video clips for these classes, but if the ambition would have been a little bit higher, the value would have been much bigger.

By Felipe O G C B

Sep 5, 2016

In my opinion, it gets too technical and it is not a self contained course at all. Neither it is a beginner course for game theory. If someone is looking to understand the real basics of it, should take the Univeristy of Tokyo course. Some lessons were really abstract and I ended up looking for information in other websites to understand it. Another thing... I suppose the three lecturers are incredible good in their respective fields, but in the teaching part, Some Shoham's lessons were like listening to a robot. M. O Jackson is pretty clear in his explanations altough too technical, and Leyton Brown has a very clear way to teach, but I honestly got lost many times in the final exercises.

By Arshaan S

Sep 4, 2020

It was way too heavy into math. I find it covered a lot less theory than Game Theory should. Sure, I did learn a lot, but they did not explain it the best at times, and frequently I had no idea how to apply what I just learned. I got a 10% on the final exam first try. I'm a smart kid, straight A's, taking all honors and ap's, so this isn't something that happens often. In fact, this is the first time I've gotten a score that low. This really goes to show I didn't learn well from this course, and unless you only think of things from a logical standpoint and math, this may not be the best course for you.

By Diogo C

Jun 26, 2018

I was looking for something that covered more material, as I was already familiar with many of the concepts. This is simply a matter of expectation, however, and not entirely the course's fault.I feel like the math was given with little to no explanation. More attention should be given there, at the very least to point to where the formulas come from and how to derive similar ones.Finally, the exercises, while definitely helpful!, could have been more general and difficult, to force people to seek for the answers instead of just following rote calculations blindly following the class.

By Bernd K

Jun 21, 2022

I successfully completed the course in 3 days. It is based on the mathematical foundations found in any game theory book. The book by Leyton-Brown, Shoham Essentials of Game Theory is given as a bibliography. The course is divided into 7 chapters and each chapter has 2 quizzes and in the 8th chapter comes the final test. The course is of intermediate difficulty and is suitable for anyone with an interest in brain teasers. The videos about the technical implementation are not necessary

By George C

Nov 1, 2017

The lectures were great and averaging an hour of lecture per week, the instructors were able to incorporate a lot of material. The only problem was the equations they used were never explained thoroughly enough to my learning style. I wish there were more resources to the equations and understanding the symbols associated with Game Theory. Finally, it would be great if the quizzes incorporated more conceptual questions versus strictly computational.

By Vadym B

Oct 23, 2017

Generally a good course, but unfortunately some terms were given in a really obscure way. Therefore had to look for better clarifications on other resources. In addition, some procedures in terms of resolution for exercises were provided badly. Thus I found myself pausing a video and trying to guess where came one value from and where it went afterwards and it turnued out to that one and so on...

By Zijian

May 30, 2020

Great course except Yoav Shoham's lectures. He definitely didn't spend much time on preparing it. His lecture is full of "Err...Emm...Arr", and sometimes he speaks out conflict information compare to the slides. In week 4 he has two lectures but they are actually one, the second one contains the first one in its first 9 minutes.

Again, great course, the other two instructors are fantastic.

By Rishabh D S

Nov 7, 2019

The teachers and fantastic and the content is great. I am grateful to Coursera, Stanford University and the professors to provide this interesting course of Game Theory. To just enumerate a downside to this course is that at some points the teaching methods of the professors become uninteresting and also there is better explanation for concepts available on the internet.

By Leo W

Jun 30, 2021

Interesting topic, but some of the lectures can get a bit dull and drag on. I think more connections to real life applications of the content would have made it more interesting too. The problem sets were pretty fun to think through and I enjoyed the problem solving and logic aspects of it. Overall pretty decent course, although not too useful for real life.