The title of an article in The Economist. Very relevant to CMSS.

Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery is the most prestigious general expository journal for Computer Science. A useful review article entitled Using Complexity to Protect Elections has been published this month by Piotr Faliszewski, Edith Hemaspaandra and Lane Hemaspaandra. Piotr has visited the CMSS earlier this year and the other authors are collaborators of CMSS members.

Two computer scientists (Yoav Shaham and Kevin Leyton-Brown) have recently produced a book on multi-agent systems, a spinoff from which is a self-contained introduction to game theory aimed at interdisciplinary users. Check it out and give your feedback! It has received excellent reviews so far.

Noam Nisan is one of the authors of the recent book Algorithmic Game Theory and his blog at http://agtb.wordpress.com/ is focused on this topic. It should be of interest to members of this group. He has a recent post on the history of this very active new field, in which he says:

“As the Internet was growing around the mid-to-late 1990’s, several threads of research emerged that somehow connected three key elements: Computer Science, Economics & Game-Theory, and the Internet.    Within the networking community, several researchers started worrying about the non-cooperative nature of the Internet, and started considering the issue of incentives.  Within the AI community, the coordination between multiple software “agents” became an area of study.  Electronic commerce started flourishing, and the underlying basic questions started emerging. A few economists started studying Internet-related economic questions.  Around the late 1990’s the different groups of people with these different motivations started talking to each other, and a joint field started emerging.  “