We first play and then analyze wars of attrition; the games that afflict trench warfare, strikes, and businesses in some competitive settings. We find long and damaging fights can occur in class in these games even when the prizes are small in relation to the accumulated costs. These could be caused by irrationality or by players' having other goals like pride or reputation. But we argue that long, costly fights should be expected in these games even if everyone is rational and has standard goals. We show this first in a two-period version of the game and then in a potentially infinite version. There are equilibria in which the game ends fast without a fight, but there are also equilibria that can involve long fights. The only good news is that, the longer the fight and the higher the cost of fighting, the lower is the probability of such a fight.

1. Introduction: Five First Lessons
2. Putting Yourselves Into Other People's Shoes
3. Iterative Deletion and the Median-Voter Theorem
4. Best Responses in Soccer and Business Partnerships
5. Nash Equilibrium: Bad Fashion and Bank Runs
6. Nash Equilibrium: Dating and Cournot
7. Nash Equilibrium: Shopping, Standing and Voting on a Line
8. Nash Equilibrium: Location, Segregation and Randomization
9. Mixed Strategies in Theory and Tennis
10. Mixed Strategies in Baseball, Dating and Paying your Taxes
11. Evolutionary Stability: Cooperation, Mutation, and Equilibrium
12. Evolutionary Stability: Social Convention, Aggression, and Cycles
13. Sequential Games: Moral Hazard, Incentives, and Hungry Lions
14. Backward Induction: Commitment, Spies, and First-mover Advantages
15. Backward Induction: Chess, Strategies, and Credible Threats
16. Backward Induction: Reputation and Duels
17. Backward Induction: Ultimatums and Bargaining
18. Imperfect Information: Information Sets and Sub-game Perfection
19. Subgame Perfect Equilibrium: Matchmaking and Strategic Investments
20. Subgame Perfect Equilibrium: Wars of Attrition
21. Repeated Games: Cooperation vs. the End Game
22. Repeated Games: Cheating, Punishment, and Outsourcing
23. Asymmetric Information: Silence, Signaling and Suffering Education
24. Asymmetric Information: Auctions and the Winner's Curse

This course is an introduction to game theory and strategic thinking. Ideas such as dominance, backward induction, Nash equilibrium, evolutionary stability, commitment, credibility, asymmetric information, adverse selection, and signaling are discussed and applied to games played in class and to examples drawn from economics, politics, the movies, and elsewhere.