<div dir="ltr">Dear all,<div><br></div><div>Following Seb and Enrico's tutorial on Mechanism Design and Online Mechanism Design. Today we have our third tutorial session given by Dr <span style="font-size:13px">Maria Polukarov</span> in our game theory reading group. Maria will introduce a fairly new line of research on "social choice". She will <span style="font-size:13px">give an overview of the existing results and present a number of open problems in this fiel</span><span style="font-size:13px">d.</span></div><div><br></div><div>Noticing that we will have another reading session on this Thursday about "coalition formation in multi-agent systems" given by Filippo Bistaffa. Details TBA.</div><div><br></div><div>Venue/Time:</div><div><span style="font-size:13px">B32/3073, 1:15pm - 2pm (online participation: </span><a href="http://goo.gl/bTKsje" target="_blank" style="font-size:1em;color:rgb(147,88,77);text-decoration:none;font-family:georgia,serif;line-height:1.8">http://goo.gl/bTKsje</a><span style="font-size:13px">)</span></div><div><br></div><div><span style="font-size:13px">Title: </span></div><div><span style="font-size:13px">Strategic Voting and Strategic Candidacy in Multi-Agent Systems</span><br style="font-size:13px"><br style="font-size:13px"><span style="font-size:13px">Abstract: </span></div><div><span style="font-size:13px">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.</span><br style="font-size:13px"><br style="font-size:13px"><span style="font-size:13px">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.</span><br style="font-size:13px"><br style="font-size:13px"><span style="font-size:13px">The tutorial will give an overview of the existing results and present a number of open problems in this---fairly new---line of research.</span><br></div><div><br></div><div><div><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div>Cheers,</div><div>Dengji</div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
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