Hugo Sonnenschein (1940-2021)

 A chain of emails originating from U. Chicago brings the news that Hugo Sonnenschein has died.

Along with his many accomplishments as an economic theorist and then as a university administrator, he was a mentor to many, both formally and informally.  

Among the famous economists whose dissertations he supervised (taken from Wikipedia) are  John Roberts, Salvador Barbera, Dilip Abreu, Faruk Gul, Matt Jackson, Vijay Krishna, and Phil Reny.

Here's the list of Hugo's students from the Mathematics Genealogy Project: Abreu, Dilip; Barbera, Salvador; Cho, In-Koo; Dudey, Marc; Fang, Ryan; Fiaccadori, Marco; Gul, Faruk; Krishna, Vijay; Mailath, George; Mardones, Felipe; McLennan, Andrew; Nava, Francesco; Novshek, William; Pearce, David; Reny, Philip; Resende, Jose; Roberts, Donald; Santamaria, Martin; Simon, Leo; Sontheimer, Kevin; Spiegel, Matthew; Vincent, Daniel

The U. Chicago obit is at the link above. Here's Hugo's Wikipedia page that also focuses on his presidency at the University of Chicago. 

Here's Hugo's page at the History of Economic Thought project, which focuses on his contributions to general equilibrium theory and social choice.

Here's his cv.

Before becoming president of U. Chicago, Hugo was Princeton's provost. Some of the changes he instituted at Chicago were controversial among those who feared that they would make Chicago more like Princeton. Here's the Chicago Sun Times on that:

Hugh Sonnenschein, controversial former University of Chicago president, dead at 80.  He drew criticism from students and scholars including Saul Bellow for a university push to expand enrollment and cut the number of required courses to let students take more electives.

 

I first encountered Hugo in his capacity as Editor of Econometrica from 1977-1984.  He was the editor who brought game theory into Econometrica, and so he played a big role in making Economics the principle home of game theory since then.

Hugo Sonnenschein in 2017

************

Update: here's a longer, less hurried obit from U. Chicago

Hugo Sonnenschein, 11th president of the University of Chicago, 1940-2021

and here is one from the Barcelona School of Economics:

In memoriam: Hugo Sonnenschein (1940-2021)

Workshop on Behavioral Game Theory, University of East Anglia, July 15-16

 Here's the announcement:

"Our annual Workshop on Behavioral Game Theory offers leading researchers the opportunity to present current experimental research related to the topic of game theory: the study of strategic interaction using methods of game theory, experimental economics and psychology.  

"The workshop will last for two days on 15 and 16 July. There will be twenty invited speakers along with three plenary talks (see further information below).  

...

"Speakers:

Daniel Friedman, UC Santa Cruz; Yaroslav Rosokha, Purdue University; Heinrich Nax, University of Zurich; Frank Heinemann, TU Berlin; Friederike Mengel, University of Essex; Andis Sofianos, University of Heidelberg; David Gill, Purdue University; Tridib Sharma, ITAM; Alexander Brown, Texas A&M University; Tatiana Kornienko, University of Edinburgh; Xiaomin Li, Caltech; Emanuel Vespa, University of California, San Diego; Evan Calford, Australian National University; Chiara Aina, University of Zurich; Yuval Heller, Bar-Ilan University; Alistair Wilson, University of Pittsburgh; Andy Brownback, University of Arkansas; Manuel Munoz-Herrera, NYU Abu Dhabi; David J Cooper, Florida State University & University of East Anglia; Filippo Massari, University of East Anglia; 

Plenary Speakers: Cristina Bicchieri, University of Pennsylvania; Yan Chen, University of Michigan; Jörgen Weibull, Stockholm School of Economics

International (Stonybrook) Virtual Conference on Game Theory July 5 - 8, 2021

  The program this year looks unusually great. (If it doesn't show up well on mobile, click on the link instead...)  The event is hosted by Virtual Chair and will take place on the Gather.town platform.

International Conference on Game Theory

July 5 - 8, 2021

All times in Eastern Time (GMT -4)

Click on the talk title for more information.

Monday, July 05
09:30 - 10:00	Breakfast
10:00 - 10:30	Jon Kleinberg  (Cornell University) Algorithmic Monoculture and Social Welfare
10:30 - 11:00	Annie Liang  (Northwestern University) Data and Incentives
11:00 - 11:15	Break
11:15 - 11:45	Navin Kartik  (Columbia University) Improving Information from Manipulable Data
11:45 - 13:00	Poster Session
13:00 - 14:00	Robert Wilson  (Stanford University) Large Auctions
14:00 - 14:15	Break
14:15 - 14:45	Peter Cramton  (University of Cologne) Lessons from the 2021 Texas electricity crisis
14:45 - 15:15	Srihari Govindan  (University of Rochester) Toward an Axiomatic Theory of Stability
15:15 - 16:15	Reception for Robert Wilson

 

Tuesday, July 06
09:30 - 10:00	Breakfast
10:00 - 10:30	Michael Kearns  (University of Pennsylvania) Between Group and Individual Fairness for Machine Learning
10:30 - 11:00	Rediet Abebe  (University of California, Berkeley) TBA
11:00 - 11:15	Break
11:15 - 11:45	Jamie Morgenstern  (University of Washington) TBA
11:45 - 12:15	Irene Lo  (Stanford University) TBA
12:15 - 13:00	Meet the Speakers (Monday and Tuesday)
13:00 - 14:00	Jean Tirole  (Tolouse School of Economics) Safe Spaces: Shelters or Tribes?
14:00 - 14:15	Break
14:15 - 14:45	Éva Tardos  (Cornell University) The Virtue of Patience in Strategic Queueing Systems
14:45 - 15:15	Stephen Morris  (MIT) Conflation of Impressions: Market Thickness versus Efficiency

 

Wednesday, July 07
09:30 - 10:00	Breakfast
10:00 - 10:30	Maria-Florina Balcan  (Carnegie Mellon University) TBA
10:30 - 11:00	Benjamin Brooks  (University of Chicago) A Strong Minimax Theorem for Informationally-Robust Auction Design
11:00 - 11:15	Break
11:15 - 11:45	Daniela Saban  (Stanford University) TBA
11:45 - 13:00	Poster Session
13:00 - 13:30	Michael Jordan  (University of California, Berkeley) On Dynamics-Informed Blending of Machine Learning and Game Theory
13:30 - 14:00	Moshe Tennenholtz  (Technion--Israel Institute of Technology) Data Science with Game Theory Flavor
14:00 - 14:15	Break
14:15 - 14:45	Renato Paes Leme  (Google Research) Interactive Communication in Bilateral Trade
14:45 - 15:15	Constantinos Daskalakis  (MIT) TBA

 

Thursday, July 08
09:30 - 10:00	Breakfast
10:00 - 10:30	Marina Halac  (Yale University) Monitoring Teams
10:30 - 11:00	Eran Shmaya  (Stony Brook University) TBA
11:00 - 11:15	Break
11:15 - 11:45	Yiling Chen  (Harvard University) TBA
11:45 - 12:15	Tim Roughgarden  (Columbia University) Transaction Fee Mechanism Design
12:15 - 13:00	Meet the Speakers (Wednesday and Thursday)
13:00 - 14:00	Paul Milgrom  (Stanford University) Reprise of Nobel lecture (Auction Research Evolving: Theorems and Market Designs)
14:00 - 14:15	Break
14:15 - 14:45	Shengwu Li  (Harvard University) Investment Incentives in Near-Optimal Mechanisms
14:45 - 15:15	Susan Athey  (Stanford University) TBA
15:15 - 16:15	Reception for Paul Milgrom

Tom Schelling (who passed away in 2016) gets a Memorial Minute at Harvard

 From the Harvard Gazette, March 3, 2021

Thomas Crombie Schelling, 95.  Memorial Minute — Faculty of Arts and Sciences

submitted by Eric S. Maskin, Amartya Sen, Richard J. Zeckhauser, Benjamin M. Friedman

"Thomas C. Schelling taught at Harvard for 32 years, in the Department of Economics and in the Kennedy School. More than any other thinker, Schelling influenced the West’s conceptual approach to the nuclear dangers after World War II. He was an outstanding economist, but ordinary disciplinary boundaries could not contain his fertile mind. Schelling’s contributions interwove theoretical understanding and policy-relevant applications. He laid bare the underpinnings of such problems as nuclear deterrence, racial segregation, smoking, and climate change. Schelling eschewed mathematical expression; he wrote in plain but elegant English. He often developed ideas using examples from everyday life and then applied them to global issues. For instance, he illuminated the architecture of threats and promises first within the family and then in international affairs.

...

"The Nobel Prize committee wrote that Schelling’s insights proved “to be of great relevance for conflict resolution and efforts to avoid war,” and, unsurprisingly, he devoted his Nobel lecture to what he called the “nuclear taboo.”

"As the threat of nuclear war receded, Schelling applied his characteristic approach to other big problems. He analyzed the damage, to both the individual and society, of smoking and other personal addictions. He anticipated future work in behavioral economics and psychology with his working assumption that often what appears to be irrational behavior of an individual is instead a reflection of different aspects of that individual’s self. He probed the problem of racial segregation and showed how easily it can arise even if people have only a tiny preference for their own race. In his final decades, Schelling’s principal focus was climate change. That concern was not new for him; in 1980 he chaired the Ad Hoc Study Panel on Economic and Social Aspects of Carbon Dioxide Increase, under President Carter."

***********

Previous posts:

Saturday, March 7, 2009

Microstructure of Macro Behavior

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Tom Schelling (1921-2016)

Interviews with Fuhito Kojima, Bob Wilson, and Al Roth in the Japanese economic magazine Diamond Weekly

 Here are three interviews conducted by the journalist Kohei Takeda for the Japanese economic magazine  DIAMOND WEEKLY, on their website DIAMOND ONLINE.   

Here are the headlines and beginnings via Google Translate.

The essence of the Nobel Prize in Economics "Game Theory", explained by a former colleague of the award winner--Interview with Fuhito Kojima, Professor of the University of Tokyo, Director of Market Design Center, University of Tokyo  by Kohei Takeda : Reporter

The interview begins with these opening words from Fuhito:

"Eight years ago, when Al (Professor at Alvin Roth Stanford University), who I had been taught, received the award, we held a grand celebration and press conference. I thought I couldn't do that this year due to the spread of the new coronavirus infection, but in the evening of the award day (October 12), planned by him and his wife Emily, in the garden of Al's house. A small celebration was held while keeping a certain distance from each other.

"At universities in the United States, teachers and students tend to live very close to the campus, so fellow researchers have more relationships with their neighbors. I still lived near the university, so I received an invitation email from Emily on the day and participated in the celebration. ...

"To me, Paul was a colleague at the university, but he is also like a mentor. After I got a job at Stanford University about 10 years ago, my research field was the same "market design" in the Faculty of Economics (Editor's note: one of the research fields of game theory) , and sometimes I wrote a co-authored paper. , I was able to build a good relationship.

"He is a major researcher I have known since I was a student... Bob taught both Al and Paul, so academically I'm also Bob's "grandson."

************

2020 Nobel Prize Winner "Auction Theory for Business" Special Lecture--Interview with Professor Emeritus of Robert Wilson Stanford University by Kohei Takeda : Reporter

The first thing Bob was asked to explain was his work on the winner's curse:

"I started working in this area in the 1960s. The background to this was the issue of oil drilling rights among US oil companies at that time. They had very incomplete information about what their oil reserves were. From the size of the oil field to whether or not it was filled with hydrocarbons, there were many things we didn't know. Oil companies were under pressure to estimate their reserves in such an unknown environment.

"When auctioning under these circumstances, each participating player tends to overestimate in order to win the bid. In this case, each estimate is a function to increase the likelihood of bidding, but oil companies face the challenge of significantly lower rates of return after investing in oil rigs. Was there.

"Eventually, this is (in a situation where each player does not have the same information, the information is asymmetrical, and the player eventually chooses the less valuable one in an attempt to maximize his or her profits). (Adverse selection) ”was recognized as a problem. In other words, there was a tendency to win bids only when overestimating.

"What I have built is a theory for bidding various things in the best possible way, taking into account the situation of such adverse selection. This achievement has attracted a great deal of attention and is one of my early achievements in research. The negative effect of overestimating what is being bid on and winning the auction has been called "Winner's Curse". However, the best bidding strategy takes its existence into account, so you won't suffer from the curse of the winner."

***********

Nobel laureate in economics "Matching theory that can be used in business" --Interview with Professor Alvin Roth Stanford University by Kohei Takeda : Reporter

JET Stanford

Here's an email sent yesterday by my department chair:

"It has belatedly come to my attention that the Journal of Economic Theory recently published a 50^th anniversary issue, which included a collection of the 50 most influential papers included in the journal since its inception.  Nine of those papers included coauthors who are members of our department.  Special congratulations to Paul Milgrom, who coauthored four of them! 

Here are the Stanford-Econ-coauthored papers on the list (I REALLY hope I didn't overlook any -- if so, please let me know!): 

David Kreps, Paul Milgrom, John Roberts, and Robert Wilson, “Rational cooperation in the finitely repeated prisoners’ dilemma,” JET, August 1982. 

Paul Milgrom and John Roberts, “Predation, reputation, and entry deterrence,” JET, August 1982. 

Paul Milgrom and Nancy Stokey, “Information, trade and common knowledge,” JET, February 1982.   

B. Douglas Bernheim, Bezalel Peleg, and Michael Whinston, “Coalition-Proof Nash Equilibria I. Concepts,” JET, June 1987. 

Drew Fudenberg, Bengt Holmstrom, and Paul Milgrom, “Short-term contracts and long-term agency relationships,” JET, June 1990. 

Matthew Jackson and Asher Wolinsky, “A Strategic Model of Social and Economic Networks,” JET, October 1996. 

Matthew Jackson and Alison Watts, “The evolution of social and economic networks,” JET, October 2002. 

Larry Epstein and Martin Schneider, “Recursive multiple-priors,” JET, November 2003. 

Alvin Roth, Tayfun Sonmez, and M. Utku Unver, “Pairwise kidney exchange,” JET, December 2005. 

Best, 

Doug

B. Douglas Bernheim

Edward Ames Edmonds Professor of Economics

Chair, Department of Economics"

******************

And here is the full list of 50 papers:

Articles celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Journal of Economic Theory

Stony Brook Game Theory conference, July 20-24

International Conference on Game Theory, Zoom Webinar, July 20 - 24, 2020  (Registration here)

Monday, July 20

09:30 - 10:15  Éva Tardos  (Cornell University)
Stability and Learning in Strategic Queuing Systems
10:15 - 11:00 Tilman Börgers  (University of Michigan)
Learning Simplicity
11:00 - 11:15 Break
11:15 - 12:00 Plenary Address
Daron Acemoglu  (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Too Much Data: Prices and Inefficiencies in Data Markets
12:00 - 12:45 Break
12:45 - 13:30  Plenary Address
Yuliy Sannikov  (Stanford Graduate School of Business)
TBA
13:30 - 13:45 Break
13:45 - 14:30 John Geanakoplos  (Yale University)
Money and Status: How to Incentivize Work in a Meritocracy
14:30 - 15:15 Alexander Frankel  (University of Chicago Booth School of Business)
Information Hierarchies
15:15 - 16:00 Andreas Blume  (University of Arizona)
Information Processing: Contracts versus Communication

Tuesday, July 21

09:30 - 10:15 Ran Spiegler  (Tel Aviv University )
Cheating with (Recursive) Models
10:15 - 11:00 Kareen Rozen  (Brown University)
TBA
11:00 - 11:15 Break
11:15 - 12:00 Plenary Address
Robert J. Aumann  (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
A Synthesis of Behavioral and Mainstream Economics
12:00 - 12:45 Break
12:45 - 13:30  J. Aislinn Bohren  (University of Pennsylvania)
Inaccurate Statistical Discrimination: An Identification Problem
13:30 - 14:15 Ignacio Esponda  (University of California Santa Barbara)
Asymptotic Behavior of Bayesian Learners with Misspecified Models
14:15 - 14:30 Break
14:30 - 15:15 Dirk Bergemann  (Yale University)
Search, Information and Prices
15:15 - 16:00 Hector Chade  (Arizona State University)
Screening in Vertical Oligopolies

Wednesday, July 22

09:30 - 10:15 Myrna Wooders  (Vanderbilt University)
Non-Cooperative Team Formation and a Team Formation Mechanism
10:15 - 11:00 George J. Mailath  (University of Pennsylvania)
Coalition-Proof Risk Sharing Under Frictions
11:00 - 11:15 Break
11:15 - 12:00 Plenary Address
Oliver Hart  (Harvard University)
Prosocial Corporate Governance
12:00 - 12:45 Break
12:45 - 13:30 Vasiliki Skreta  (UT Austin and University College London)
Information Design by an Informed Designer
13:30 - 14:15 Kyungmin Kim  (Emory University)
Competition under Moment Conditions
14:15 - 14:30 Break
14:30 - 15:15 Juan Ortner  (Boston University)
Bargaining with Evolving Private Information
15:15 - 16:00 Marcin Pęski  (University of Toronto)
Bargaining under Incomplete Information

Thursday, July 23

09:30 - 10:15 Jörgen Weibull  (Stockholm School of Economics)
John Nash Meets Immanuel Kant: Moral Motivation in Strategic Interactions
10:15 - 11:00 Aviad Heifetz  (The Open University of Israel)
Liberal Parentalism
11:00 - 11:15 Break
11:15 - 12:00 Plenary Address
Parag Pathak  (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Leaving No Ethical Value Behind: Triage Protocol Design for Pandemic Rationing
12:00 - 12:45 Break
12:45 - 13:30 Plenary Address
Matthew Gentzkow  (Stanford University)
Ideological Bias and Trust in Information Sources
13:30 - 13:45 Break
13:45 - 14:30 Marzena Rostek  (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Decentralized Market Design
14:30 - 15:15 Yeon-Koo Che  (Columbia University)
Weak Monotone Comparative Statics
15:15 - 16:00 Leeat Yariv  (Princeton University)
Dominance Solvability in Random Games

Friday, July 24

09:30 - 10:15 Nicole Immorlica  (Microsoft Research New England)
Incentivizing Exploration with Selective Data Disclosure
10:15 - 11:00 Sven Rady  (Universitat Bonn)
Overcoming Free-Riding in Bandit Games
11:00 - 11:15 Break
11:15 - 12:00 Plenary Address
Jean Tirole  (Toulouse School of Economics)
Digital Dystopia
12:00 - 12:45 Break
12:45 - 13:30 S. Nageeb Ali  (Pennsylvannia State University)
Reselling Information
13:30 - 14:15 Rachel E. Kranton  (Duke University)
Social Networks and the Market for News
14:15 - 14:30 Break
14:30 - 15:15 Hülya K. K. Eraslan  (Rice University)
Efficiency with Political Power Dynamics and Costly Policy Change
15:15 - 16:00 Lones Smith  (University of Wisonsin-Madison)
The Behavioral SIR Model with Applications to COVID-19 and the Swine Flu Pandemics

John Harsayni, on Hungarian coinage (and a memorable conversation)

The title of this blogpost is ambiguous, but the picture should disambiguate it. (As far as I know, the late great game theorist, who initiated the literature on Bayesian games of incomplete information, never wrote about coinage):

Here's the story:

Hungarian Mint Commemorates Nobel Prize Winner János Harsányi
By CoinWeek -June 25, 2020

"János (or John Charles) Harsányi, the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize laureate in Economic Sciences, was born in Budapest on May 29, 1920. His primary field of research was game theory, for which he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize with John Forbes Nash and Reinhard Selten in Economic Sciences “For his ground-breaking work in the area of non-cooperative game theory and equilibrium analysis.” In the field of game theory, they were the first scientists to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics.
...
"The Hungarian Mint has issued a silver collector coin of 10,000 forints and a copper-nickel version of 2,000 forints on the 100th anniversary of the distinguished University of California at Berkeley researcher’s birth.
...
"The silver coin, with a face value of 10,000 forint is struck in .925 fine silver and weighs 31.46 grams. It costs $67.50. The non-ferrous metal 2,000 forint is produced from an alloy of copper (75%) and nickel (25%) and weighs 30.8 grams. It is priced at $19.95. The mintage limit of both the silver collector coin in proof finish and that of the non-ferrous version in BU finish is 5,000 pieces of each."
************

I don't need a coin to remind me of John, but reading about his monetization brought back a particularly memorable conversation.

In the summer of 1975, after completing my first year as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, I drove back to California to spend the summer visiting Harsanyi at Berkeley. I had perhaps imagined many long conversations, but the way he made space for me was to give me his office, while he worked from home. So our conversations were not so frequent, and were somewhat formal: he called me Professor Roth, and I of course called him Professor Harsanyi.

On at least one occasion I drove him down to Stanford when there was a seminar we both wanted to attend. The conversation I recall most vividly came on the return trip from one of these, when we gave a lift up to Berkeley to Bob Aumann, who had purchased a used car there and needed to pick it up.  We all rode in my fairly small 1966 Ford Mustang (purchased used in 1971 when I began graduate school.)  I drove, Harsanyi sat in the front passenger seat, and Bob sat behind him

We had a lively conversation the whole way. What I remember about it were the forms of address. Bob and John, and Bob and I, were naturally on a first name basis. But, throughout the drive, Harsanyi called me Professor Roth, and I called him Professor Harsanyi.  I hope I didn't show that I thought it was hilarious, but it is possible that I addressed my passengers by name more often than strictly necessary. And so it went, Bob and John, Al and Bob, Professor Harsanyi and Professor Roth.

We stopped at the house Bob was going to, and as soon as the car door closed behind him, Professor Harsanyi turned to me and said "Professor Roth, perhaps it would be best if we went to a first name basis." 

And so we did.

Behavioral Economics, Computation, and Game Theory, all in Budapest in July, or online...

Here's the (appropriately cautious) announcement:

Behavioral EC '20
2nd Workshop on Behavioral Economics and Computation

The 2nd Workshop on Behavioral EC will be held in conjunction with the 21st ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (ACM EC '20) and will be co-located with the 6th World Congress of the Game Theory Society (GAMES 2020), on July 17, 2020, in Budapest, Hungary. The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers from diverse subareas of EC who are interested in the intersection of human economic behavior and computation, to share new results and to discuss future directions for behavioral research related to economics and computation. It will be a full-day workshop, and will feature invited speakers, contributed paper presentations and a panel discussion.

...
Submission deadline: May 18, 2020, 11:59pm PDT.
Notification: June 11, 2020
The workshop: July 17, 2020
COVID-19 Updates: We are aware of the severe restrictions across the globe due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The SIGecom board will update with the final plans for the EC 2020 conference on or by May 6. In the event the in-person conference does not happen, we will hold the workshop virtually.  

Egg trading by hermaphrodite fish--evolutionary game theory by Peña, Nöldeke, and Puebla

Game theory is about how payoffs among multiple parties change the way they interact with each other. One of the most interesting areas of application is in the study of evolution of populations.  Here's a paper about reciprocity in reproductive strategies that depend on the thickness of various aspects of the market...

The Evolution of Egg Trading in Simultaneous Hermaphrodites
Jorge Peña, Georg Nöldeke, and Oscar Puebla

Abstract: Egg trading—whereby simultaneous hermaphrodites exchange each other’s eggs for fertilization—constitutes one of the few rigorously documented and most widely cited examples of direct reciprocity among unrelated individuals. Yet how egg trading may initially invade a population of nontrading simultaneous hermaphrodites is still unresolved. Here, we address this question with an analytical model that considers mate encounter rates and costs of egg production in a population that may include traders (who provide eggs for fertilization only if their partners also have eggs to reciprocate), providers (who provide eggs regardless of whether their partners have eggs to reciprocate), and withholders (cheaters who mate only in the male role and just use their eggs to elicit egg release from traders). Our results indicate that a combination of intermediate mate encounter rates, sufficiently high costs of egg production, and a sufficiently high probability that traders detect withholders (in which case eggs are not provided) is conducive to the evolution of egg trading. Under these conditions, traders can invade—and resist invasion from—providers and withholders alike. The prediction that egg trading evolves only under these specific conditions is consistent with the rare occurrence of this mating system among simultaneous hermaphrodites.

Here's the full text.

Handbook of the Shapley Value

Google books makes available excerpts from the new
Handbook of the Shapley Value
edited by Encarnación Algaba, Vito Fragnelli, Joaquín Sánchez-Soriano
CRC Press, Dec 6, 2019

I wrote a Foreword:
The Shapley Value: a giant legacy, and ongoing research agenda,
the final paragraph (p6) of which is

"Lloyd Stowell Shapley was one of the founding giants of game theory, who helped lay the foundations of both cooperative and non-cooperative game theory, and who influenced everything and everyone in the field. He was born in 1923. His paper defining the Shapley value was published in 1953, when he was 30 years old.  A previous volume on the Shapley value, Roth (1988), was published in honor of his 65th birthday. The present volume brings up to date the important stream of research on the Shapley value that has continued, unabated, ever since Shapley first proposed it, and that I expect will continue for the foreseeable future."

In this connection, see my recent post about the use of the Shapley value for explaining particular predictions made by machine learning algorithms:

Sunday, December 22, 2019  The Shapley value and explainable machine learning

"The Ethical Algorithm" by Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth (book talk at Google)

Here's a talk about "The Ethical Algorithm--The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design"
by Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth.


IMHO it would make a fine last minute holiday gift for those interested in econ and market design as well as for fans of computer science and algorithms:) 

The Shapley value and explainable machine learning

Machine learning via deep neural nets is famously a black box approach to prediction, but efforts are being made to open the black box and explain why a given prediction was made, using the Shapley value.

Here's a story from Datanami:

December 9, 2019
Real Progress Being Made in Explaining AI, by Alex Woodie

"Google made headlines several weeks ago with the launch of Google Cloud Explainable AI.  Explainable AI is a collection of frameworks and tools that explain to the user how each data factor contributed to the output of a machine learning model.

“These summaries help enterprises understand why the model made the decisions it did,” wrote Tracy Frey, Google’s director of strategy for Cloud AI, in a November 21 blog post. “You can use this information to further improve your models or share useful insights with the model’s consumers.”

"Google’s Explainable AI exposes some of the internal technology that Google created to give its developers more insight into how its large scale search engine and question-answering systems provide the answers they do. These frameworks and tools leverage complicated mathematical equations, according to a Google white paper on its Explainable AI.

"One of the key mathematical elements used is Shapley Values, which is a concept created by Nobel Prize-winning mathematician Lloyd Shapley in the field of cooperative game theory in 1953. Shapley Values are helpful in creating “counterfactuals,” or foils, where the algorithm continually assesses what result it would have given if a value for a certain data point was different.

...

“The main question is to do these things called counterfactuals, where the neural network asks itself, for example, ‘Suppose I hadn’t been able to look at the shirt colour of the person walking into the store, would that have changed my estimate of how quickly they were walking?'” Moore told the BBC last month following the launch of Explainable AI at an event in London. “By doing many counterfactuals, it gradually builds up a picture of what it is and isn’t paying attention to when it’s making a prediction.”

Harvey Prize to Christos Papadimitriou

The Technion's 2018 Harvey Prize prize, to Christos Papadimitriou, has been only recently announced: it will be awarded this month.

From Columbia University:
Professor Christos Papadimitriou Awarded the 2018 Harvey Prize
OCT 08 2019

"The Harvey Prize for Science and Technology for 2018 is awarded to professor Christos Papadimitriou for his work on the theory of algorithms and computational complexity and its application to the sciences. Papadimitriou will receive the award at a ceremony at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. Technion first presented the award in 1972 and two awards are given yearly. The scientists behind the genome editing technology CRISPR/Cas9 are also awardees this year.

“Professor Papadimitriou is considered the founding father of algorithmic game theory, defining key concepts, formulating key questions and proving basic results,” said Peretz Lavie, professor and president of the Technion. “He is a pioneer in the application of algorithms and complexity to other fields, including economics, biology and more.”

********
And here's the entry at the Harvey Prize link:

The Harvey Prize, established in 1971 by Leo M. Harvey of Los Angeles, is awarded annually at Technion for exceptional achievements in science, technology, and human health, and for outstanding contributions to peace in the Middle East, to society and to the economy.

PROF. CHRISTOS H. PAPADIMITRIOU

Leo M. Harvey (1887-1973) was an industrialist and inventor. He was an ardent friend and supporter of Technion and the State of Israel.

Over the years, more than a quarter of Harvey laureates have subsequently won the Nobel Prize.

The award ceremony will take place in November 2019 at Technion.

In Memoriam: Martin Shubik

Ben Mattison and Kerry DeDomenico at Yale have sent around an email pointing to some brief remembrances of Martin Shubik from his friends, that was distributed at his memorial service.

In memoriam: Martin Shubik

 It's short, read the whole thing and think of Martin. 

I would have loved to read what Lloyd Shapley would have said about Martin, but I was delighted to read, in Pradeep Dubey's loving account, what Martin once said about Lloyd, after beating him in a game of Go: “No matter what happens in the game, Lloyd always wins the analysis.”

If you're in a hurry, here's what Bob Aumann had to say about Martin's professional contribution:

"I think the most important thing that can be said about Martin scientifically is that he is simply the father of the application of game theory to modern economic theory—an immensely important contribution. Von Neumann & Morgenstern’s book is called “Theory of Games and Economic Behavior,” and indeed they must be credited with the fundamental idea of studying economics with Game Theory tools; but their approach—Stable Sets—never really caught on. It was Martin who made the highly successful connection of the Core with the Competitive Equilibria, and this is what got started the ball rolling."
Robert Aumann
***************

Some earlier posts:

Thursday, December 20, 2012 Martin Shubik

Thursday, August 23, 2018  Martin Shubik, 1926-2018

Game theory in the Handelsblatt

The German newspaper Handelsblatt has a game theory column: SPIELTHEORIE-KOLUMNE

The article at the link is about matching markets, including a recent application to daycare in Mannheim.  Here's the headline:

Wie Ökonomie Systeme effizienter macht – und sogar der eigenen Gefühlslage hilft

And here's Google translate:

"How economics makes systems more efficient - and even helps one's own emotional state"

How Market Design Emerged from Game Theory, by Roth and Wilson in the JEP

This paper was quite fun to collaborate on, with my dissertation advisor Bob Wilson...

How Market Design Emerged from Game Theory: A Mutual Interview
Alvin E. Roth and Robert B. Wilson
Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 33, Number 3—Summer 2019—Pages 118–143

Abstract
"We interview each other about how game theory and mechanism design evolved into practical market design. When we learned game theory, games were modeled either in terms of the strategies available to the players ("noncooperative games") or the outcomes attainable by coalitions ("cooperative games"), and these were viewed as models for different kinds of games. The model itself was viewed as a mathematical object that could be examined in its entirety. Market design, however, has come to view these models as complementary approaches for examining different ways marketplaces operate within their economic environment. Because that environment can be complex, there will be unobservable aspects of the game. Mathematical models themselves play a less heroic, stand-alone role in market design than in the theoretical mechanism design literature. Other kinds of investigation, communication, and persuasion are important in crafting a workable design and helping it to be adopted, implemented, maintained, and adapted."

**********
It turns out that some people read footnotes .  I got the following welcome email from Charlie Nathanson at Northwestern, expanding on one of mine (in which I reflected on writing a paper with Bob):

"I was delighted to see your reference to the Talmud in your JEP article that came out today (footnote 22). There is a verse from Pirkei Avot about the student/teacher relationship that I did not see in your footnote or in your linked blog post. In case you haven't come across it, I wanted to share it with you. It's chapter 4, verse 12 (https://www.sefaria.org/Pirkei_Avot.4.12):
רַבִּי אֶלְעָזָר בֶּן שַׁמּוּעַ אוֹמֵר, יְהִי כְבוֹד תַּלְמִידְךָ חָבִיב עָלֶיךָ כְּשֶׁלְּךָ, וּכְבוֹד חֲבֵרְךָ כְּמוֹרָא רַבְּךָ, וּמוֹרָא רַבְּךָ כְּמוֹרָא שָׁמָיִם:
Rabbi Elazar ben Shammua said: let the honor of your student be as dear to you as your own, and the honor of your colleague as the reverence for your teacher, and the reverence for your teacher as the reverence of heaven. 

Best wishes,
Charlie"

*********
And here's the footnote that prompted that email:

22 A brief account of our subsequent teacher–student interactions, along with some other remembrances related  to  the  present  essay,  is  included  in  my  intellectual  autobiography  at  the  Nobel  Prize  website:  https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economics/2012/roth/auto-biography/.   The   rabbinic   literature   does  not  overlook  teacher–student  relations.  In  the  Talmud,  for  example,  one  is  enjoined:  “Provide  for yourself a teacher and get yourself a friend ...” See my related blog post for more on this: https://marketdesigner.blogspot.com/2013/06/notes-on-teachers-and-students-from.html. The martial arts also value teacher–student relations, and I benefited from that too, as I describe at https://marketdesigner.blogspot.com/2013/06/honorary-7th-dan-black-belt-in-jka.html. 

THE 30TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON GAME THEORY at Stony Brook

This long-running game theory conference is now in its 30th year--and some of the old veterans have passed on, but there are lots of young people to keep the field vibrant.

Here's the announcement and (partial) list of participants:

THE 30TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON GAME THEORY

Stony Brook University (July 15 - July 19, 2019)

The full program is here.

I'll be speaking Tuesday at 5:00, on Market Design and Game Theory in a Large World 

John Nash, his life and untimely death: an update by Sylvia Nasar

The link may be gated, but here's a lovely piece that fills in some of the gaps for those of us who know the work that led to Nash's Nobel Prize better than the work that led to his Abel Prize.

John Nash, His Life, by Sylvia Nasar

1. 1.

Chapter First Online: 24 February 2019 The Abel Prize 2013-2017

 pp 357-377| 

Part of the The Abel Prize book series (AP)


In the same volume:

Autobiography

John Forbes Nash, Helge Holden, Ragni Piene

Pages 351-355