CS 789 THEORY SEMINAR [home]

joint with MICROECONOMIC THEORY Workshop

Speaker:    Adrian Vetta 
Affiliation:  McGill University
Date:          November 8, 2004
Title:          Quality, stability and efficiency issues in competitive games

Abstract: 

We consider a class of games called valid-utility games. Examples of such games arise in facility location, traffic routing and combinatorial auctions. We calculate the "price of anarchy" in these games and consider the associated computational questions.
We also examine the ways (and speed) in which such games may converge to stable solutions. This leads to an alternative measure of the cost of the lack of coordination in a game, and we discuss why it may be a more appropriate measure in valid-utility and other games.