Insegnamento a.a. 2018-2019

The course covers the following topics:

• Social choice theory (aggregation of individual preferences for collective decisions and related impossibility theorems).
• Aggregation of preferences through institutions described as rules of the game.
• Game theory basic tools and notions.
• Game theory applications in electoral competition, voting, legislative bargaining, public good provisions of voluntary nature, negotiations, government coalition formation processes, repeated interaction and stability.

• Understand  the conditions under which individual preferences can be aggregated to create social preferences and/or collective decisions;
• Analyze non-cooperative interaction between politicians in various contexts;
• Analyze the formation of collective decisions by majority rule or other criteria;
• Evaluate pros and cons of different electoral systems;
• Understand the causes of instability of government coalitions; understand the difficulty in obtaining efficient public good provision; internal conflicts of interests within organizations and between organizations;
• Understand the role of repeated interactions or stable environments.

• Anticipate the consequences of changes in voters’ preferences on party platforms in different institutional systems;
• Evaluate the stability of a party system and entry costs or incentives for new parties in different electoral systems;
• Evaluate the prospects for increased or decreased corruption and changes in distribution as a consequence of certain reforms in how decision making is conducted in political institutions;
• Analyze logically the strategic problem for politicians involved in negotiations.

• Face-to-face lectures
• Exercises (exercises, database, software etc.)
• Individual assignments

Given that the course aims to make the students able to analyze the decision-making processes formally and rigorously, I assign problem sets every two weeks, to be handed in three days after assignment, and such problem sets will be evaluated as part of the final grade. Moreover the TA provides some in-class solutions to prototype problems.

20% of the grade is problem sets, the rest is midterm (40%) and a final exam (40%). Attendance is highly recommended.

• M.J. OSBORNE, An Introduction to Game Theory, Oxford University Press, 2009.