Learning Paths: Guided Sequences Through Game Theory

A single idea rarely lives in one place on this site. Each learning path strings together the thinker who framed an idea, the real decision that tested it, and a scenario you can play yourself, in order.

Progress is tracked in your browser as you complete each step, with a shareable card once a path is finished.

Every learning path

• Cold War Brinkmanship: 5 steps. How a theory of commitment explains the moves that nearly ended the world, and the standoffs that echo it today.
• The Bargaining Toolkit: 5 steps. From a 2,000 year old rule for dividing a bankrupt estate to Nash's bargaining solution: how fair division actually gets decided when both sides have leverage.
• Markets and Their Failures: 5 steps. Adam Smith's invisible hand meets its limits: what happens to a market when buyers cannot tell a good deal from a bad one.
• Cooperation Under Pressure: 6 steps. Robert Axelrod's tournaments and Elinor Ostrom's commons research, tested against a real whaling collapse and a spontaneous wartime truce.
• Ancient Strategy, Modern Games: 5 steps. Sun Tzu, Kautilya, and Ibn Khaldun read decisions the way modern game theorists do, centuries before the mathematics existed.
• Level 1: Notice the Game: 4 steps. Before incentives, before equilibria: spot that you are looking at a game at all. Who is choosing, and what happens if nobody moves?
• Level 2: Find the Incentive: 4 steps. Explain behavior without assuming stupidity or malice. What is each side rewarded for, what does it cost them, and what happens if they walk away?
• Level 3: Predict the Response: 4 steps. Commit to what the other side will do before you are told. The prediction is the exercise; being wrong in a specific way is what teaches you.
• Level 4: Change One Rule: 4 steps. Most interventions demand different behavior. The ones that work change what behavior pays. Learn to tell them apart before you spend anything.
• Level 5: Follow the Game Through Time: 4 steps. Games do not sit still. A strategy is found, copied, priced in, and answered, and the advantage that started it is gone. Learn to ask what happens next.
• Level 6: See the Same Game Elsewhere: 4 steps. The culminating skill: recognizing a structure you have seen before in a setting that looks nothing like it, and knowing when the resemblance is only surface.