黑料福利网

Philip Brown, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado (Colorado Springs), is a guest of Mauro Salazar, Assistant Professor at the Control Systems technology group of the department of Mechanical Engineering, 黑料福利网.

Title  |  A Little Anarchy Never Hurt Anyone: Beyond Worst-Case Equilibria in Games 

A central theme of game theory research in recent decades has focused on deriving bounds on the worst-case performance of equilibria in noncooperative games. In much recent literature, selecting agent incentives or payoff functions to optimize worst-case equilibria has been a central research goal. However, little work has focused on understanding the practical relevance of worst-case equilibria themselves. Are these equilibria common? Are they stable?
 
In fact, our recent work suggests that worst-case equilibria are less scary than previously thought. First, for a large class of games, we prove a fundamental tradeoff between the efficiency of equilibria and their stability: if agents are highly satisfied with their actions at an equilibrium (i.e., the equilibrium is highly stable), then that equilibrium must be of relatively high efficiency. Second, we propose a paradigm of distributed algorithm design which exploits this tradeoff to ensure that agents never (or rarely) converge to worst-case equilibria.

Program (location: Gemini South 0.05)
10.45 - 11.00   Welcome with coffee
11.00 - 11.45   Lecture 
11.45 - 12.00   Q&A