Algorithmics, Social choice, Market Design, and Other Topics

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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 fo...

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.

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 Organization s Herbert Simon

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 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)