A self-contained textbook covering game theory from beginner to advanced level, written in LaTeX and compiled to PDF.

Contents

  • Game-Theory-Complete-Learning-Path.pdf — the compiled book (~110 pages)
  • main.tex — master LaTeX file (preamble, structure)
  • chapters/ — one file per chapter plus appendices

Structure

Part Chapters Topics
I. Beginner 1–6 What is game theory, utility & rationality, normal-form games & dominance, Nash equilibrium, mixed strategies, extensive-form games & backward induction
II. Intermediate 7–12 Oligopoly & applications, bargaining (Nash & Rubinstein), repeated games & the Folk Theorem, Bayesian games & auctions, signaling/cheap talk/screening, zero-sum games & minimax
III. Advanced 13–18 Existence proofs & refinements, mechanism design (VCG, Myerson) & social choice, cooperative games (core, Shapley value, matching), evolutionary game theory, algorithmic game theory (PPAD, price of anarchy, learning), frontiers (behavioral, information design, AI)
Appendices A–B Mathematical background; full solutions to all ~65 exercises

Every chapter includes boxed definitions, theorems (with proofs or proof sketches), worked examples, historical notes, and exercises. Solutions are in Appendix B.

Building the PDF

Requires a TeX distribution (TeX Live / MacTeX) with latexmk:

latexmk -pdf main.tex

The output is main.pdf. Auxiliary files can be removed with latexmk -c. The shared preamble (packages, colors, theorem boxes) lives in preamble.tex.

Per-chapter PDFs

chapter-pdfs/ contains one standalone PDF per chapter/appendix. To rebuild them:

./build-chapter-pdfs.sh

The script first compiles the full book (so cross-chapter references can be resolved), then generates a standalone wrapper for each chapter in standalone/ (reusing preamble.tex, setting the chapter counter to match the book, and importing the book's labels via the xr package) and compiles each one.

Main references

The material follows the canonical texts: Osborne & Rubinstein, A Course in Game Theory; Fudenberg & Tirole, Game Theory; Myerson, Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict; Maschler, Solan & Zamir, Game Theory; Nisan et al., Algorithmic Game Theory. A full annotated bibliography and free-resource list is included at the end of the book.