Computation and the Socio-Economic Sciences

Fred Roberts, Rakesh Vohra and myself are co-charing the DIMACS Special Focus on Computation and the Socio-Economic Sciences, a series of workshops and other activities designed to bring together computer scientists and social scientists. The focus has already hosted some good workshops on topics like Electronic Voting and Auctions. Let me put in a plug for a couple upcoming workshops.

At the end of January, Richard McLean, Daijiro Okada and myself are organizing a workshop on Bounded Rationality at Rutgers. Bounded rationality looks at game theory questions like equilibria with computationally-bounded participants.

Immediately following the Bounded Rationality workshop is the workshop on Markets as Predictive Devices (Information Markets). The organizers Robin Hanson, John Ledyard and David Pennock have created a program with a set of speakers that spread the range from theory to practice in markets designed to estimate the probability of future events. The program ends with a panel discussion on the Policy Analysis Markets that came under fire a year and a half ago for its "terror futures".

In mid-April, Rakesh Vohra and I are organizing a workshop on Large-Scale Games to be held at Northwestern. This workshop will examine questions in game theory that deal with issues in large scenarios like the internet with many players, incomplete information, lack of common knowledge, asynchrony and related problems.

We have two other scheduled workshops in the focus, Polyhedral Combinatorics of Random Utility in June and Yield Management and Dynamic Pricing in August, and many more workshops under development.