UMD Game Theory Reading Group

Game theory is finding its way into more and more CS research, as it offers useful tools that can be applied to the very abstract notion of ``rational players playing a game.''

To better understand this branch of microeconomics and mathematics, we are putting together a game theory reading group, in which we'll be covering portions of "A Course in Game Theory" by Osborne and Rubinstein, which is available online.

Now that we've gone through a good portion of this book, it will be good to discuss other topics and papers, so please keep an eye out for some good material.

Interested? Sign up to the GTRG mailing list to get updates.

Schedule for Fall 2005

If you'd like to present, please write to Dave (dml@cs.umd.edu).

Meetings are from 10-11 on Wednesdays in AVW 3258.

Date Location Chapter(s) Topics Presenter
Wednesday Sept 21 AVW 3258 N/A
  • Volunteer's Dilemma (VOD)
  • Volunteer's Timing Dilemma (VTD)
  • Here's a related link
Seungjoon Lee
Wednesday Oct 19 AVW 3258 N/A
  • Cake Cutting: Be Fair If You Can
  • Splitting a cake "fairly" amongst N people
William Gasarch
Wednesday Oct 26 11am AVW 4185 N/A
  • Cake Cutting: 4-Person Envy-Free Protocol
William Gasarch
Wednesday Nov 2 AVW 3258 N/A
  • Lower bounds for small values of N for cake cutting
  • Dr. Gasarch is also giving part 2 of a talk at 11pm in AVW 4185 on an envy-free protocol for N=4.
William Gasarch
Wednesday Nov 30 10am AVW 3258 10 (but not today)
  • Mechanism Design (aka Implementation Theory)
  • Problem statement / setup
  • Groves mechanism
  • Second price auctions
  • Nisan-Ronen
Dave Levin

Previous Semesters

To give an idea of what we've covered so far, here are old schedules:

Summer 2005

Date Location Chapter(s) Topics Presenter
Wednesday July 20 CSIC 1121 1-2.4, 3.1
  • Strategic games
  • Pure and mixed strategy Nash equilibria
  • Planning for the rest of the semester
Dave Levin
Friday July 22 CSIC 1122 2.6, 3.1-3.2
  • Existence of mixed strategy Nash eq.
  • Computing MSNE
  • Interpretations of MSNE
  • Bayesian games
Dave Levin
Wednesday July 27 CSIC 1122 2.6
  • Bayesian games
Chris Kommareddy
Friday July 29 AVW 3258 2.6, 3.3-3.4
  • Converting Bayesian games to strategic games
  • Correlated equilibria
  • Evolutionary equilibria
  • Complexity issues in computing Nash eq.
  • [Papadimitriou '05]
Aravind Srinivasan
Wednesday Aug 3 AVW 3258 4
  • Strictly/weakly dominant strategies
  • Rationalizability
Dave Levin
Friday Aug 5 AVW 3258 6.1-6.2
  • Extensive games with perfect info
  • Motivating subgame perfect eq.
Rob Sherwood
Wednesday Aug 10 AVW 3258 6.2-6.6
  • More on extensive games with perfect info:
  • Subgame perfect eq.
  • Backward induction
  • Iterated deletion of WD strategies
Dov Gordon
Wednesday Aug 17 AVW 3258 7
  • Bargaining games
Dave Levin
Friday Aug 19 AVW 3258 11
  • Extensive games with imperfect info.
Austin Parker
Friday Aug 26 AVW 3258 8
  • Repeated games
Tsz-Chiu Au

Links

Please direct questions or comments to Dave Levin (dml@cs.umd.edu). Last modified:

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