Professor Puppe, Chair of Economic Theory at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, visited the CMSS for several weeks in February and March of 2013. Professor Puppe is managing editor of Social Choice and Welfare.

On 20 March 2013, Professor Puppe gave a Public Lecture on “Choosing how to vote: the mathematics of elections”. It gives a non-technical overview of the area. With New Zealand in the midst of a review of the Mixed Member Proportional Representation (MMP) voting system, the CMSS hopes that such events will promote more informed debate on this important topic.

Link to a video record of the talk (audio plus slides) here:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/61342635/A201303201801.LTRD253350.REV1-slides.m4v

The 2010 summer workshop archive now contains almost all the slides for the talks.
The 2011 workshop is tentatively planned for December, and will have logic as a theme. More details will follow throughout the year.
Mark Wilson is now the Director of CMSS and the seminar organizer is Arkadii Slinko. Please contact us if you want to give a talk in the seminar, or otherwise visit us.
We expect some visitors in 2011, including Nadja Betzler from Germany.

A job advertisement that may be of interest to CMSS members.

Speaker: John Hillas
Affiliation: Department of Economics, UoA
Title: Backward Induction in Games with Imperfect Recall (with D. Kvasov)
Date: Wednesday, 13 October 2010
Time: 4:00 pm
Location: 301-242 [Science Centre, Symonds Street]

ABSTRACT

The standard solution concepts motivated by the idea of backward induction, subgame perfect equilibrium, extensive form perfect equilibrium, sequential equilibrium, and quasi-perfect equilibrium were explicitly defined only for games with perfect recall.  In games with imperfect recall a literal application of the same definitions is clearly inappropriate.  We give definitions that coincide with the standard definitions in games with perfect recall and define sensible solutions in games without perfect recall.

The basic idea is to look, at subsets of each player’s information sets, at the pure strategies that make that those subsets reachable and to define a system of beliefs as associating to that strategy and that subset a distribution over the other players’ strategies.  We define the relevant solution concepts and show (conjecture) that the inclusions and the relation to proper equilibrium of the associated normal that were true for games with perfect recall remain true.

Very much work in progress.

Speaker: Reyhaneh Reyhani
Affiliation: Computer Science Department, The University of Auckland
Title: A general model for effects of polls on voters’ behaviour
Date: Thursday, 4 Mar 2010
Time: 3:00 pm
Location: Room 401

The influence of pre-election polls on the result of an election is a problem that many authors have discussed. In this talk, we investigate this problem with a general model for m candidates under the plurality rule. Voters cannot be completely sure about the result of polls because of coverage bias or response bias. Therefore, we consider a general distribution of uncertainty in each poll for voters. We discuss the best strategy of voters according to the information that polls give them and how the sequence of polls leads voters to a unique equilibrium. We deduce a Duvergerian equilibrium in the limit in some cases. This is joint work in progress with Javad Khazaei and Mark Wilson.

We are now reachable at cmss.auckland.ac.nz. The acronym in the domain name should be obvious, but we will wait until it is officially confirmed before posting about it.

Modelling Health Care: Combining real-world data in an “expert system” to test policy scenarios

Peter Davis, Director, COMPASS

There is increasing interest in the application of computational techniques in the social sciences, particularly in the area of modelling social processes. We present preliminary work in building a micro-simulation model of the system of decision-making in health care in the community whereby people experience illness and go to the doctor, who then responds. We combine data from different sources to give this model a solid base in the “real world” and we test it against external data. Policy scenarios are foreshadowed. There are major opportunities for collaborative work across disciplinary boundaries.

Note: COMPASS (www.compass.auckland.ac.nz) is a research group at UoA that uses quantitative, computational techniques in social sciences. The main purpose of this talk is to explore collaborative possibilities between the two groups.

Welcome to the site for the Computational Social Science Group at the University of Auckland.