# Game Theory Resources

Curated, high-trust sources. Explainer knowledge is drawn from here, not from guesses.

## Knowledge

- [Open Yale Courses — ECON 159: Game Theory (Ben Polak)](https://oyc.yale.edu/economics/econ-159)
  Full free undergraduate course: 24 video lectures + transcripts + problem sets. The gold standard for a first pass. Polak is a virtuoso lecturer who builds everything from classroom games. **Use for:** the canonical path through dominance → backward induction → Nash equilibrium → signalling. [Lecture 1 — "Five First Lessons"](https://oyc.yale.edu/economics/econ-159/lecture-1) is where "never play a strictly dominated strategy" comes from.

- [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Game Theory](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/game-theory/)
  Authoritative, careful conceptual treatment. Heavier going but precise. **Use for:** nailing down exactly what a term means when a lesson glosses it.

- [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Prisoner's Dilemma](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/prisoner-dilemma/)
  Deep dive on the single most important game, including iterated and evolutionary versions. **Use for:** going deeper on cooperation, defection, and why repetition changes everything.

- Book: *The Art of Strategy* — Avinash Dixit & Barry Nalebuff (Norton, 2008)
  The best applied, intuition-first book on strategic thinking. Almost no math; every chapter is real decisions (business, politics, sports, negotiation). **Use for:** the "applied to my work" angle — this matches the learning style most closely. (Their earlier *Thinking Strategically*, 1991, covers similar ground.)

- [Game Theory 101 — William Spaniel](https://gametheory101.com)
  Free, tightly-scoped video + text lessons that go one concept at a time with worked matrices. **Use for:** a second explanation when a Yale lecture moves too fast, and for clean step-by-step solving practice.

## Wisdom (Communities)

- [r/GAMETHEORY](https://www.reddit.com/r/GAMETHEORY/)
  Academic-leaning subreddit (not the YouTuber). **Use for:** sanity-checking whether a real situation is modelled correctly, and "is this actually a prisoner's dilemma?" gut-checks.
- *Not yet proposed to the learner.* Revisit live communities once there's a concrete strategic problem worth posting. Update this section with any opt-in/opt-out preference.

## Gaps
- No source yet specifically on **game theory in medicine / health systems** (organ allocation, kidney exchange, screening incentives) — worth finding if the mission later tilts clinical. Kidney-exchange matching is a famous real-world mechanism-design success and would be a strong bridge example.