Education development objectives are substantial for any modern state and successful transformation of the educational sector is essential for socio-economic and socio-political development of Russian Federation. The paper focuses on the use of game-theoretic models of competition and cooperation between educational institutions for research of the problems and patterns of development of the economy of higher education in the situation of economic recession. Two basic situations are considered. Firstly, universities’ cooperation can be defined as resource, methodological and (or) material base sharing such as joint access to international libraries and databases, organizing courses with guest lecturers, etc. Secondly, we can understand universities' consolidation as cooperation. The latter becomes especially relevant due to current reorganization of the higher education sphere in Russian Federation including strengthening government requirements to quality and structure of vocational and higher education and