Planning is all nice and fine when a single entity is in charge of deciding what happens when and there is a single target state of things that is the globally desired outcome. Real-world settings tend to involve multiple decision makers who all assess the suitability of the outcome in their own terms. The field of study within mathematics for such setups is known as game theory. When the entities do not necessarily compete but instead collaborate (or form coalitions of sorts), the specific subfield of those multi-entity non-competitive settings is the theory of collaboration. In this module, we briefly venture into both.
This module will help you do the following:
If you go around telling people that you have been studying game theory, you at least need to be able to confidently discuss The Prisoner's Dilemma to get awat with it, even if you actively retained nothing else of what you learned. The below video should do the trick:
Game theory focuses on the outcomes (rewards or penalties) that individuals receive upon making specific choices in a situation where two or more individuals each make a choice; the making of the choices, everyone fully knowing the outcome table but not each others choices, is called a game.
After taking a look at the video (again with no consultation of sources, especially staying away from LLMs since this is a though exercise for you), think of at least one example situation from the following settings that could potentially be framed as such a game: (a) investors in financial markets, (b) drivers of vehicles in traffic, (c) nearby store owners active in the same retail sector.
After this module, you should be familiar with the following concepts: