Sunday, July 7, 2013

Game theory festival(s) at Stony Brook, July 8-18, and tribute to Lloyd Shapley

Each year for a long time now there has been a summer festival of game theory at Stony Brook.
Here's the announcement of this summer's events:

The 24th Stony Brook Game Theory Festival

The Festival Events:
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July 08 - 12, 2013: International Conference on Game Theory
Organizers:  Bernard De Meyer (Universite de Paris 1)
Srihari Govindan (University of Rochester)
Consulting Committee:  Abraham Neyman (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Sylvain Sorin (Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris 6)


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July 14 - 15, 2013: Workshop on Experimental Game Theory
Organizer:  Drew Fudenberg (Harvard University)


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July 16 - 18, 2013: Workshop on Computational Game Theory
Organizer:  Bernhard von Stengel (London School of Economics)


CONGRATULATIONS!

It is a truth universally acknowledged that much that is fundamental and beautiful in the field of Game Theory has been shaped, and nurtured over the years, by Lloyd Shapley. One need merely name topics where his work was seminal and path-breaking, and served to define entire areas of research: the value (with finite and continuum player sets), core, voting games and power indices, stochastic games, repeated games, matching, potential games, market games in coalitional and strategic form, the convergence phenomenon for perfectly competitive economies (core and value in the coalitional setting, and non-cooperative equilibrium in the strategic), convex games, fictitious play,....

The list is by no means exhaustive, nor chronological, and others have expanded and elaborated on his work elsewhere. It was for one of these topics, his joint work with David Gale on matching, that he got the Nobel prize --- a prize that so many in the game theory community felt was long, long, overdue; and for which they would sincerely want to laud the Nobel committee.

Lloyd has always been shy, often self-effacing and detached, at a personal level. But we know very few who have been so forthcoming when it comes to matters academic. He is a founding member of the Center for Game Theory in Economics at Stony Brook, and has regularly participated in our summer conferences for the last 23 years (indeed from even before, since 1984, in the earlier incarnation of the Center as the "Institute for Decision Sciences"). Lloyd's presence has been a constant source of inspiration for us. He gives freely of his time, and the generous overflow of his ideas have stimulated many and frequently proved decisive for their research. In particular, Lloyd goes out of his way to interact with young scholars. All of us look forward very much to the "60th anniversary" of his paper on stochastic games in the summer of 2013 at Stony Brook, in the same spirit as the earlier "50th anniversary" of the value. (The event will also contribute towards the celebration of his 90th birthday, though we know that for Lloyd this will have marginal value.)
Pradeep Dubey & Yair Tauman
Center for Game Theory in Economics, Stony Brook

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