Fall 2007 Seminar Series

DATE: October 4
LOCATION: E40-298
TIME: 4:15pm
Reception immediately following in the ORC ConferenceRoom, E40-106

SPEAKER:
Shang-Hua Teng

TITLE
Game and Market Equilibria: Approximation and Smoothed Complexity

ABSTRACT
I will present some recent advances in Computational Game Theory and particularly in computing and approximating Nash equilibria. As you may have already known, the notion of Nash equilibria has captured the imagination of much of the computer science theory community, both for its many applications in the growing domain of online interactions and for its deeps and fundamental mathematical structures. As the complexity and scale of typical internet applications increase, the problem of efficiently analyzing their game-theoretic properties become more pointed. I will cover the recent results in settling several open questions about Nash equilibria. I will particularly focus on the complexity of approximation in, as well as the smoothed complexity of, non-cooperative two-player games. Those results link the computational complexity of Nash equilibria to Brower's fixed point, Sperner's lemma, and to Papadimitriou's complexity class, PPAD, characterized by the end-of-line problem. If time permits, I will also cover the extensions of these results to other equilibrium problems such as in trading and market economies. -Joint work with Xi Chen (Tsinghua University), Xiaotie Deng (The City University of Hong Kong). Also with Li-Sha Huang (Tsinghua University) and Paul Valiant (MIT).