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CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

3rd  Summer  Workshop, The Centre for Mathematical Social Science (CMSS) at The University of  Auckland, 20-21 February, 2012

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The Centre for Mathematical Social Science (CMSS) at The University of
Auckland (New Zealand) is planning to organize its 3rd  Summer
Workshop, which will take place 20-21 February 2012 in Auckland. The umbrella title for the workshop is: “Algorithmic and game-theoretic aspects of social choice”.  The confirmed speakers from overseas at this date are:

– Jerome Lang (Université Paris Dauphine)
– Toby Walsh  (University of NSW and NICTA)
– Piotr Faliszewski  (AGH Institute of Technology, Krakow)
– Edith Elkind (NTU, Singapore)

The formal presentations will be accompanied by research collaborations in small groups with participation from visitors and local researchers, including PhD
students. The proposed topics for these small group sessions are to be
discussed but will certainly include voting procedures and voting equilibria, manipulation of voting procedures, simple games and power indices.

The Centre is planning to provide financial support to seminar presenters but the exact amount of it will be known later, as it  depends on the outcome of several grant applications. New participants  are welcome. If you wish to participate please contact

Arkadii Slinko
Department of Mathematics
The University of Auckland,
Centre for Mathematics in Social Sciences
Seminar & Events Organizer
a.slinko@auckland.ac.nz

The programme co-chair Edith Elkind is a CMSS external affiliate and frequent visitor.

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WINE 2011, the 7th Workshop on Internet & Network Economics.

December 11-14, 2011, Singapore.

Over the past decade, there has been a growing interaction between
researchers in theoretical computer science, networking and security,
economics, mathematics, sociology, and management sciences devoted to
the analysis of problems arising from the Internet and the World Wide
Web. The Workshop on Internet & Network Economics (WINE) is an
interdisciplinary forum for the exchange of ideas and results arising
from these various fields. The seventh WINE will take place in
December, 2011 in Singapore.

All submissions will be peer-reviewed and evaluated on the basis of
the quality of their contribution, originality, soundness, and
significance. Industrial applications and position papers presenting
novel ideas, issues, challenges and directions are also welcome.
Submissions are invited in the following topics but not limited to:

* Algorithmic game theory
* Algorithmic mechanism design
* Auction algorithms and analysis
* Computational advertising
* Computational aspects of equilibria
* Computational social choice
* Convergence and learning in games
* Coalitions, coordination and collective action
* Economics aspects of security and privacy
* Economics aspects of distributed and network computing
* Information and attention economics
* Network games
* Price differentiation and price dynamics
* Social networks.

Submission Format

Authors are invited to submit extended abstracts presenting original
research on any of the research fields related to WINE’11. No
simultaneous submission to other publication outlets (either a
conference or a journal) is allowed.

An extended abstract submitted to WINE’11 should start with the title
of the paper, each author’s name, affiliation and e-mail address,
followed by a one-paragraph summary of the results to be presented.
This should then be followed by a technical exposition of the main
ideas and techniques used to achieve these results, including
motivation and a clear comparison with related work. The extended
abstract should not exceed 12 single-spaced pages (full papers) or 6
pages (short papers) using reasonable margins and at least 10-point
font (excluding references and title page). If the authors believe
that more details are essential to substantiate the claims of the
paper, they may include a clearly marked appendix (with no space
limit) that will be read at the discretion of the Program Committee.
It is strongly recommended that submissions adhere to the specified
format and length. Submissions that are clearly too long may be
rejected immediately. The proceedings of the conference will be
published by Springer-Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science
series, and will be available for distribution at the conference.
Submissions are strongly encouraged, though not required, to follow
the LNCS format.

Submission of Working Papers

To accommodate the publishing traditions of different fields, we allow
the authors to submit working papers that they intend to publish in
journals that do not accept papers previously published in conference
proceedings. These submissions will be reviewed together with the
regular submission using the same acceptance criteria, but only a
one-page abstract will appear in the proceedings with a URL that
points to the full paper and that will be reliable for at least two
years. Open access is preferred although the paper can be hosted by a
publisher who takes copyright and limits access, as long as there is a
link to the location. At the submission stage, such papers should be
formatted in the same way as the regular submissions (in particular,
they can be submitted as long or short papers), but the title page
should state clearly that the submission is a working paper.

Important Dates

* Submission deadline (regular papers): July 31, 2011.
* Submission deadline (short papers): August 7, 2011.
* Notification: September 15, 2011.
* Camera-ready copy is due on September 28, 2011.

For more information and submission instructions, see the conference homepage:
http://web.spms.ntu.edu.sg/~wine11/

Speaker:     Egor Ianovski
Affiliation: The University of Auckland
Title:       Logics of belief change
Date:        Thursday, 9 Jun 2011
Time:        4:00 pm
Location:    Room 6115, Owen Glenn Building

We are at war with Eurasia. We have always been at war with Eurasia. Eastasia is our ally. How then, should we respond to an announcement of war with Eastasia? Is it enough to drop the belief that Eastasia is our ally, or do we need to revise our entire belief set?

What if the next day we are led to believe that we are at war with Eurasia again? Can we revert to our prior belief set, or has the first announcement changed our beliefs forever? If I have a friend that heard the same announcements, what can I conclude about their beliefs? Did they change the same way as mine or if not, for what reasons? In this talk we examine two main trends in the logical treatment of belief change, with focus on problems that arise with iteration and a multi-agent setting.

Note an unusual day of the week! Everyone welcome!

Speaker:     Simona Fabrizi
Affiliation: Massey University (Albany)
Title:       Suggested retail prices with downstream competition
Date:        Tuesday, 24 May 2011
Time:        4:00 pm
Location:    Room 6115, Owen Glenn Building

We analyze a manufacturer’s choice whether to recommend retail prices (RRP) to horizontally differentiated downstream competing retailers or to use more traditional vertical price restraints, such as resale price maintenance (RPM), when consumers have reference-dependent preferences. If recommended prices are taken as a reference point, consumers can suffer from loss aversion when facing retail prices above this reference point, but also benefit from gain proneness when prices are set below this level. In equilibrium, retailers do not set prices above their recommended levels; manufacturers prefer RPM over RRP when retailers follow the recommendation strictly; but manufacturers prefer RRP over RPM when the recommendation is undercut by retailers (discounting occurs). Two types of conflicts with respect to consumers’ surplus potentially arise when manufacturers can choose between RRP and RPM. There are combinations of gain proneness and degrees of competition for which either (i) manufacturers choose traditional resale price maintenance (RPM) even though recommending prices would have been consumers’ surplus enhancing; or, vice versa (ii) manufacturers choose to recommend retail prices (RRP) despite it would have been consumers’ surplus enhancing not to do so.

This paper is written Jointly with Steffen Lippert (Massey University), Clemens Puppe (Karlsruhe University of Technology) and Stephanie Rosenkranz (Utrecht University)

Speaker:    Mark C. Wilson
Affiliation: The University of Auckland
Title:       Decisiveness, power, and value
Date:        Tuesday, 10 May, 2011
Time:        4:00 pm
Location:    Room 6115, Owen G. Glenn Building

The connection between individual contribution and collective value  has been studied in the framework of cooperative (coalitional) games with transferable utility, most famously in terms of the Shapley value which has led to a general theory of “values”. In the special case of simple games, the concept of (voting) power has been studied, most famously by Banzhaf, again leading to a substantial literature, with more controversy than in the TU game case. In each case, there is a collective notion which yields the individual one in a straightforward way, and which is less understood than the individual one. I will attempt to give a unified presentation of  all these ideas and their relationships, with the aim of shedding some light on some arguments over definitions of power and pointing the way to further research. This is a preliminary discussion of several possible papers in progress with Geoff Pritchard and Reyhaneh Reyhani. Audience contributions are encouraged.