Visit to TU Delft and Amsterdam

I just returned from a research visit to TU Delft. My hosts were Tomas Klos, Cees Witteveen, Mathijs de Weerdt and Yingqian Zhang. They are a part of an applied algorithms group with an increasing interest in game theory and mechanism design. It was great making some new contacts and getting feedback on some recent research. I received an award winning Senz umbrella as a gift. The umbrella has been designed by people from TU Delft.

The visit coincided with an MSc thesis defence of Bart de Keijzer who finished an excellent thesis. The main contribution of the thesis was identifying some structural properties of the lattice of canonical weighted voting games and enumerating them. This helps give exact solutions to designing weighted voting games with specific properties like minimum distance from a target power index vector. Congratulations Bart!

The trip also gave me an opportunity to visit Amsterdam and meet up with Michiel, a friend i hadn't met in four years.  We ended up having coffee on the top floor of Metz & Co which provided a great view of the city.

Are we in control of our own decisions?

Computation of Nash Equilibria in Finite Games

The latest volume of Economic Theory is based on a symposium organized by Prof von Stengel a while ago. The volume is totally focused on algorithmic techniques for the computation of Nash equlibria in finite games. It includes a well written and accessible overview by Tim Roughgarden on the relevant computational complexity concepts for equilibrium computation.

Nobel lectures of game theorists/social choice theorists

2007

But Who Will Guard the Guardians? Leonid Hurwicz

Mechanism Design: How to Implement Social Goals Eric S. Maskin

Perspectives on Mechanism Design in Economic Theory  Roger B. Myerson 

2005

War and Peace Robert J. Aumann

An Astonishing Sixty Years: The Legacy of Hiroshima Thomas C. Schelling

1998 

The Possibility of Social Choice Amartya Sen

1994 

Games with Incomplete Information John C. Harsanyi

John Nash 

Multistage Game Models and Delay Supergames Richard Selten 

1978 

Rational Decision-Making in Business Organizations Herbert Simon

Interesting event

Mathematics of Phase Transitions: Past, Present, Future

Date: Thursday 12 to Sunday 15 November 2009;  Venue: Mathematics Institute, University of Warwick

Speakers include among others:
Christian Borgs, David Brydges, John Cardy, Jean-Dominique Deuschel,
Roberto Fernández, Ostap Hryniv, Dima Ioffe, Wilfrid Kendall,  Wolfgang
König, Peter Mörters, Stephan Luckhaus, Charles-Édouard Pfister, Balint
Tóth.

The meeting  will also celebrate Prof. Roman Kotecky's 60th birthday.

COMSOC 2010

COMSOC 2010 which will be held in Düsseldorf, Germany from 13 to 16 September 2010 has an impressive speaker list. It is good to see that notable economists are taking interest in the new discipline emerging at the interface of social choice theory and computer science.

• Gabrielle Demange (Paris School of Economics; tentative)
• Matthew O. Jackson (Stanford University)
• Bettina Klaus (University of Lausanne)
• Hervé Moulin (Rice University)
• Hannu Nurmi (University of Turku)

The First Symposium on Innovations in Computer Science (ICS 2010)

The accepted paper list of The First Symposium on Innovations in Computer Science (ICS 2010) is out. There is a sizable subset of papers broadly in the domain of algorithmic game theory:

• Are Stable Instances Easy? by Yonatan Bilu and Nathan Linial
• Leveraging Collusion in Combinatorial Auctions by Jing Chen, Silvio Micali, and Paul Valiant
• Guaranteeing Perfect Revenue From Perfectly Informed Players by Jing Chen, Avinatan Hassidim, and Silvio Micali
• A New Look at Selfish Routing by Christos Papadimitriou and Gregory Valiant
• Game Theory with Costly Computation by Joseph Halpern and Rafael Pass
• Adversarial Leakage in Games by Noga Alon, Yuval Emek, Michal Feldman, and Moshe Tennenholtz
• Beyond Equilibria: Mechanisms for Repeated Combinatorial Auctions by Brendan Lucierr
• Playing games without observing payoffs by Michal Feldman, Adam Kalai and Moshe Tennenholtz
• Market Equilibrium under Separable, Piecewise-Linear, Concave Utilities by Vijay V. Vazirani and Mihalis Yannakakis
• Bounding Rationality by Discounting Time by Lance Fortnow and Rahul Santhanam
• Local Algorithms for Finding Interesting Individuals in Large Networks by Mickey Brautbar and Michael Kearns
• A New Approximation Technique for Resource-Allocation Problems by Barna Saha, Aravind Srinivasan
• Circumventing the Price of Anarchy: Leading Dynamics to Good Behavior by Maria-Florina Balcan and Avrim Blum and Yishay Mansour
• Reaching Consensus on Social Networks by Elchanan Mossel and Grant Schoenebeck