CES Economic Theory Seminar

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The Economic Theory workshop is a weekly seminar taking place on fridays 12-13h at the Maison des Sciences Economiques (106-112 Boulevard de l'Hôpital). This seminar is a venue for theoretical work in Economics and for work drawing on quantitative methods in Economics. Defined by an approach rather than by a specific theme, the topics of the seminar can concern a variety of areas in Economics, such as (non exhaustively), micro economics, game theory, mathematical economics, decisions theory, finance or macro economics. The seminar functions as an internal workshop but also regularly greets speakers from other institutions.

Organizers: Emily Tanimura, Stéphane Zuber, Anna Bogomolnaia and Hervé Moulin,

If you want to be added to the seminar mailing list, or for any other query about the Economic Theory seminar, please feel free to contact Emily Tanimura (emily(dot)tanimura(at)univ-paris1(dot)fr).

It is supported by the Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne, CNRS and Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

• December 5th: Franz Dietrich (Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne  )

Title:  Collective intelligence through aggregation (by F. Dietrich & C. List)

Location: Maison des Sciences Économiques, room S17. 

Summary:  Suppose a committee, expert panel, or other group is making judgments on some issues, where these may be not just yes/no-questions, such as whether a defendant is guilty or innocent, but include variables with many possible values, such as macroeconomic or meteorological variables or travel directions. Furthermore, there may be interconnections between different issues, as in the case of economic or climate variables. How can the group arrive at “intelligent” collective judgments, based on the group members’ individual judgments? We investigate three challenges raised by this judgment-aggregation problem. First, reasonable methods of aggregation (such as defining the collective judgment for each issue as the average or median judgment) can produce inconsistent collective judgments. Secondly, many methods of aggregation are manipulable by strategic voting. Finally, not all methods of aggregation are conducive to tracking the truth on the issues in question. We prove new impossibility or possibility theorems on all three challenges, identifying what it takes to produce collective judgments in a consistent, truthtracking, and non-manipulable manner and thereby to achieve collective intelligence through aggregation. Overall, the median method, though imperfect, performs reasonably well. We also note the relevance of our analysis for non-human group decisions.

• December 12th: Joseph Halpern (Cornell University )

Title:  Distributed Computing Meets Game Theory:

Fault Tolerance and Implementation with Cheap Talk

Location: Maison des Sciences Économiques, room S17. 

Summary:  Traditionally, work in distributed computing has divided the agents into

"good guys" and "bad guys".  The good guys follow the protocol; the bad guys

do everything in their power to make sure it does not work.  By way of

contrast, game theory has focused on ``rational'' agents, who try to

maximize their utilities.  Here I try to combine these viewpoints.

Specifically, I consider what we call (k,t)-robust protocols/strategies,

which tolerate coalitions of rational players of size up to $k$ and up to

$t$ malicious players.   I focus in particular on the problem that economists

have called implementing a mediator; in computer science, this

essentially amounts to multiparty computation.  Ideas from cryptography

and distributed computing allow us to prove results on how many agents are

required to implement a (k,t)-robust mediator just using "cheap talk", that

is, just talking to each other.  These results subsume (and, in some cases,

correct) results from the game theory literature. The talk is self-contained.  No background in game theory or distributed

computing will be assumed.  It includes joint work with Ittai Abraham,

Danny Dolev, Ivan Geffner, and Rica Gonen.

• February 6th: Evan Piermont (Royal Holloway University )

Title:  TBA

Location: Maison des Sciences Économiques, room S17 

Summary:  TBA

• February 13th: Noriaki Kiguchi  (Tokyo University)

Title :  TBA

Location: Maison des Sciences Économiques, room S17. 

Summary:  TBA

• April 24th: Peter Hammond (Warwick University)

Title:  TBA

Location: Maison des Sciences Économiques, room S17. 

Summary:  TBA

• June 26th: Arnaud Dragicevic  (Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok  )

Title: Transitioning from a Non-Symbiotic to a Symbiotic Regime: A Renewable Natural Resources Perspective

Location: Maison des Sciences Économiques, room S17. 

Summary:  TBA