Multistage Games: Extensive Form and Feedback Strategies

This lecture covers the concepts of multistage games, focusing on extensive form and feedback games. It begins with a review of static and zero-sum games, emphasizing the importance of Nash equilibria and the mean-max theorem. The instructor introduces extensive form games, explaining their structure through game trees, where nodes represent players' decisions and branches represent possible actions. The lecture highlights the differences between simultaneous and sequential play, using examples like tic-tac-toe and chess to illustrate these concepts. The notion of information sets is discussed, detailing how players' knowledge of previous actions affects their strategies. The lecture also delves into backward induction as a method for finding subgame perfect equilibria in games with perfect information. The instructor explains how feedback games differ from traditional games, emphasizing the importance of understanding players' strategies across multiple stages. The session concludes with a summary of key concepts and a discussion of practical applications in game theory.