Games, Algorithms, and Social Choice
Penn State | DS 402: Emerging Trends | Spring 2022
Time and location: Tuesday & Thursday, 10:35 am - 11:50 am
Instructor: Hadi Hosseini
Office hours: Tuesday & Thursdays 11:50 am - 12:30 pm on Zoom (or by appointment)
Games, Algorithms, and Social Choice is an interdisciplinary course that offers a broad overview on theoretical and algorithmic foundations of Artificial Intelligence through solutions developed within the fields of game theory and computational social choice. In the age of Internet, this field has seen a growing number of real-world applications in distributed platforms and online marketplaces. This course focuses on introducing students to the foundations of decision making in the presence of multiple intelligent—and often strategic—players. It will cover topics in game theory and social choice theory with specific focus on fair resource allocation, matching, preference aggregation, and non-cooperative games.
Evaluation: course evaluation is based on homework assignments (2 x 10%), paper critiques (20%), participation (15%), and a course project (45%). The projects should include solid and non-trivial implementations and/or novel research questions.
Textbooks
The following books are not required but highly recommended. These books are generally available online for free.
Handbook of Computational Social Choice
Felix Brandt, Vincent Conitzer, Ulle Endriss, Jérôme Lang, and Ariel D. Procaccia, Cambridge University Press, 2016.Economics and Computation: An Introduction to Algorithmic Game Theory, Computational Social Choice, and Fair Division
Editors Jörg Rothe, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2016.Multiagent Systems: Algorithmic, Game-Theoretic, and Logical Foundations
Kevin Leyton-Brown and Yoav Shoham, Cambridge University Press.