MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
OPERATIONS RESEARCH CENTER
FALL 2004 SEMINAR SERIES

DATE

Thursday, October 28, 2004

LOCATION: Room E40-298           TIME: 4:15pm

Reception immediately following in the
Philip M. Morse Reading Room, E40-106

SPEAKER

Professor Adrian Vetta
Assistant Professor
Department of Mathematics & Statistics
McGill University

TITLE

Quality and Efficiency Issues in Submodular Games

ABSTRACT

     We consider a class of games called submodular 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 present an alternative measure of the cost of the lack of coordination in a game and discuss why it may be a more appropriate measure in submodular and other games.