Title
Games other people play
Abstract
Games were used by Wittgenstein as an example in the philosophy of language of a concept that can have many and dramatically divergent meanings in different contexts.Case in point: Games are familiar in the Concurrency community as models of dynamic, multi-staged threats to correctness. In Economics, on the other hand, games refer to a family of mathematical models (including, strictly speaking, the games alluded to above) whose intention is to model the behavior of rational, selfish agents in the face of situations that are to varying degrees competitive and cooperative. In recent years there has been an increasingly active interface, motivated by the advent of the Internet, between the theory of games on the one hand, and the theory of algorithms and complexity on the other, and both with networking. This corpus of research problems and reults is already quite extensive, rich, and diverse; however, one can identify in it at least three salient themes: First, there is the endeavor of developing efficient algorithms for the fundamental computational problems associated with games, such as finding Nash and other equilibria; this quest is more than the predictable reflex of our research community, but it is arguably of fundamental value to Game Theory at large. There is also the field of algorithmic mechanism design, striving to devise computationally efficient methods for designing games whose equilibria are precisely the socially desirable outcomes (for example, that the person who has the highest personal appreciation for the item being auctioned actually wins the auction). And finally we have an ever-expanding family of problems collectively given the playful name "the price of anarchy," studying how much worse a system emerging from the spontaneous interaction of a group of selfish agents can be when compared with the ideal optimum design.
Year
DOI
Venue
2005
10.1007/11539452_4
CONCUR
Keywords
Field
DocType
research community,ideal optimum design,fundamental value,algorithmic mechanism design,fundamental computational problem,computationally efficient method,concurrency community,ever-expanding family,selfish agent,efficient algorithm,mathematical model,price of anarchy,game theory
Game mechanics,Turns, rounds and time-keeping systems in games,Price of stability,Cognitive science,Computer science,Theoretical computer science,Algorithmic mechanism design,Philosophy of language,Price of anarchy,Artificial intelligence,Game theory,The Internet
Conference
Volume
ISSN
ISBN
3653
0302-9743
3-540-28309-9
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
1
Authors
1
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Christos H. Papadimitriou1166713192.54