[Game-theory] Reminder: (Today 1:15pm) Tutorial on Strategic Voting and Strategic Candidacy in Multi-Agent Systems

[Dengji Zhao]

Dear all,

Following Seb and Enrico's tutorial on Mechanism Design and Online
Mechanism Design. Today we have our third tutorial session given by Dr Maria
Polukarov in our game theory reading group. Maria will introduce a fairly
new line of research on "social choice". She will give an overview of the
existing results and present a number of open problems in this field.

Noticing that we will have another reading session on this Thursday about
"coalition formation in multi-agent systems" given by Filippo Bistaffa.
Details TBA.

Venue/Time:
B32/3073, 1:15pm - 2pm (online participation: http://goo.gl/bTKsje)

Title:
Strategic Voting and Strategic Candidacy in Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract:
Multi-agent decision problems, in which independent agents have to agree on
a joint plan of action or allocation of resources, are central to various
applications. Often in such settings, agents' individual preferences over
available alternatives may vary, and they may try to reconcile these
differences by voting. Based on the fact that agents may have incentives to
vote strategically and misreport their real preferences, much of the
literature in computational social choice focuses on evaluating voting
rules by their resistance to strategic behaviours and uses computational
complexity as a barrier to them. In contrast, more recent works (counting
from 2010) take another natural approach and analyse voting scenarios from
a game-theoretic perspective, viewing strategic parties as players and
examining possible stable outcomes of their interaction (i.e., equilibria).
Finally, the candidates themselves may also have preferences about the
outcome and try to affect it by strategically choosing whether to stand for
election or not.

This tutorial will begin by introducing the audience to basic notions of
social choice and game theory, and will lead them to an understanding of
strategic behaviours by voters and candidates, modelling such scenarios as
voting/candidacy games, and analysing the existence of stable game outcomes
(including those with predetermined properties), as well as their
reachablity by natural iterative processes, such as best-response dynamics
or its restricted variants. Convergence of such procedures is a highly
desirable property of the game, since, from a system-wide perspective, it
implies that a system has a deterministic stable state that can be reached
by the agents without any centrallised control and/or communication.

The tutorial will give an overview of the existing results and present a
number of open problems in this---fairly new---line of research.

Cheers,
Dengji
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