Algorithmic Game Theory Project
Our class will culminate with a final project (and paper) that allows
students to to explore material beyond what was covered in class and
to share that material with other students. The project involves
students researching and writing a paper on a topic of interest related to the topics
of the class, giving a short presentation on the topic,
and reading and evaluating other students' papers. Here is the "pipeline":
- By November 5, post on the blog a 2-paragraph outline of the topic you intend to explore, along with at least 2 references that you will be using as a starting point.
- Investigate the topic and write your paper (at least 2400 words, which translates to about
8 pages double-spaced, 12 point font, and then references).
- By December 5, submit your paper as a blog post.
- Prepare a short (20 minute) presentation on the topic. Presentations will occur
in class December 6-8.
- By December 12, perform peer review of project reports from other students in the class (more details on this later).
You are welcome to collaborate with one other person on the project, but
you are not required to do so.
There are a number of possibilities for what your project can be about. Here are some examples:
-
Pick a research topic or 1-2 related research papers in algorithmic game theory to synthesize and explain. Formulate additional research questions related to what you have read. These could be theoretical questions or experimental questions. If you have the time and interest, explore some of these questions.
Some possibilities for how you could find a topic:
- Pick a chapter from this
algorithmic game
theory text (username=agt1user, password=camb2agt)
and explore its contents. Some very interesting
chapters that we probably won't have time to touch on much, if at all,
are the chapters on "cryptography and game theory", "mechanism design
without money", "incentives and pricing in communications networks",
"incentives in peer-to-peer systems", "incentives and information
security", "computational aspects of prediction markets",
"manipulation-resistant reputation systems", "evolutionary game
theory".
- Pick a few sections that cover material we didn't cover in class from this book on multi-agent systems.
-
Explore papers in
the Electronic Commerce conference,
the World-Wide-Web conference (especially
the monetization track),
the Workshop on the Economics of Networks, Systems and Computation or another conference related to this field and find a paper that interests you.
Notes: I've given links here only to the most recent of each of these
conferences. But it should be easy for you to find earlier versions of
the conferences online and many other possible papers/topics. (By the way, when you see
a paper title that interests you, it is simply a matter of googling that title to find the actual paper.)
- Some specific potentially hot topics:
pricing of data in the cloud (see e.g. this paper),
pricing of digital goods (see e.g. this paper),
net neutrality
(see e.g. this and
this),
crowd-sourcing (e.g. this),
privacy (see e.g. this),
incentives in distributed systems (see e.g. this
and this),
charity auctions (e.g. this), and
ad exchanges.
-
Pick a company and some aspect of its business and study it game
theoretically. Define the goals and objectives of the company and the incentive
structure involved in the service/products involved. Formulate
the game and/or mechanism design problem involved.
If you define a game, attempt to analyze it and understand
its Nash equilibria. If you define a mechanism, make an attempt to
analyze the mechanism used by the company and perhaps to propose alternative
mechanisms. Explore the successes and failures of the company in terms
of this business and any interesting related game-theoretic behavior.
Here are few examples of companies/businesses/topics you could explore.
-
Study a mechanism that has been put into place by some government. What
are the goals and what is the incentive structure for the participants?
Is it working or not? Attempt to understand and analyze the mechanism game theoretically and propose alternatives.
Here are some examples of such mechanisms that you could look into:
- Study game theory and its connections to another field, such as
biology, sociology or politics. (There are huge literatures on all
these topics -- you'll have to find a good set of starting points
yourself.)
- Explore behavioral models for how people really play games and how this corroborates or contradicts the theoretical foundations of game theory. Here is an
example paper on the topic.
If there is some other
topic that interests you, talk to me about it and I may be able to help
you find resources. I am very flexible about your topic.