Games are everywhere! As long as you are alone in making a decision, without other known actors influencing the outcomes of your decision, you are in the realms of the Decision theory. As soon as interactions with other humans enter into the picture, even the simplest decision becomes quite difficult to analyze and make. What we know about the context of interaction and other participants, as well as what we can observe during the interaction become very important in the decision process.
Of course many games that human have developed for their amusement are based on such interactions in different informational contexts. Hence the name of the tools we have developed to structure our analysis of such interactions: Game theory.
This small set of pages proposes a very quick introduction to game theory and to its main concepts, mainly through simple examples, rather than full mathematical definitions and developments (GT has become a subfield of applied mathematics today, with many applications also in modern computer algorithms, data science, and of course, economics, its first main application domain since
[Cournot, 1838]). The interested reader may consult the references given at
the end of the last page.