Colloquium Abstract

Thursday, June 12, 2008 • 3:30 PM • Robert N. Noyce Conference Room, SFI

Eva Tardos Cornell University

Games in Networks: The Price of Anarchy, Stability, and Learning

Network games play a fundamental role in understanding behavior in many domains, ranging from communication networks through markets to social networks. Such networks operate and evolve through interactions of large numbers of diverse participants. In light of these competing forces, it is surprising how efficient these networks are. It is an exciting challenge to understand the operation and success of these networks in game theoretic terms: what principles of interaction lead selfish participants to form such efficient networks?

In this talk we focus on a couple simple games, and study the degradation of quality of solution caused by the selfish behavior of users. We compare the selfish outcome to a centrally designed optimum both in terms of the quality of Nash equilibria and also the quality of outcomes of learning behavior by the users.

Host: Aaron Clauset