************************************************* DIMACS Workshop on Bounded Rationality January 31 - February 1, 2005 DIMACS Center, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ
Organizers: Lance Fortnow, University of Chicago, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Richard McLean, Rutgers University, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Daijiro Okada, Rutgers University, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Presented under the auspices of the Special Focus on Computation and the Socio-Economic Sciences. ************************************************ Traditionally, economists and game theorists have assumed that strategic agents are fully rational in the sense that all players can completely reason about the consequences of their actions. In the last few decades, a number of game theorists have argued, in part motivated by experimental results, that human players do not behave in a way consistent with theoretical predictions. Questions have been raised regarding the postulate of full rationality and some have attempted formalization of partially or boundedly rational players and games played by such players. This research falls under the rubric of bounded rationality. If one takes the view that a process of decision making in economic or other social situations constitutes a computation in a formal sense of theoretical computer science, then one is naturally led to some notion of bounded computational power as a formal expression of bounded rationality. Two important and complementary questions in this line of inquiry are: (1) What is the computational power required in order to play a game in a way consistent with full rationality? (2) If players are limited in their computational power, how different will equilibrium outcomes be from the fully rational case? With regard to the first question, some researchers have examined the computational complexity of finding best responses in games. As to the second question, a number of researchers have focused on repeated games played by various types of computing machines with an emphasis on their role in facilitating cooperative behavior. In one branch of this work, bounded rationality is interpreted as bounded recall where a player's strategic options are limited by constraints that are placed on memories of past actions. A larger literature models bounded rationality in terms of finite automata. In particular, the strategies of players are limited to those that are implementable by finite state automata. Further work that studies strategies implementable by Turing machines may be found. Most of the aforementioned work has been carried out by game theorists and, with the exception of a short burst of activity in the mid-1990's, there has not been a significant amount of activity in bounded rationality from the computer science point of view. This workshop will bring together economists and game theorists interested in bounded rationality, as well as theoretical computer scientists with experience in limited computational models. It will explore previous interactions between computer scientists and economists concerning this topic. It will then address such issues as: What are the desiderata of a model of bounded rationality? How do models of bounded rationality affect conclusions of standard models? What aspects of human behavior have no compelling model of bounded rationality to explain them? Are there computational models that properly estimate the computational power of bounded players while allowing for an analysis that yields useful results? ************************************************************** Registration Fees: (Pre-registration deadline: January 24, 2005) Please see website for additional registration information. ********************************************************************* Information on participation, registration, accomodations, and travel can be found at: http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/Workshops/Bounded/ **PLEASE BE SURE TO PRE-REGISTER EARLY** ******************************************************************* --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]