DIMACS Workshop on Bounded Rationality

Dates: January 31 - February 1, 2005
DIMACS Center, CoRE Building, Rutgers University

Organizers:
Lance Fortnow, University of Chicago, fortnow@cs.uchicago.edu
Richard McLean, Rutgers University, rpmclean@rci.rutgers.edu
Daijiro Okada, Rutgers University, okada@econ.rutgers.edu
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 but in the last few decades a number of game theorists have argued 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 proposed formalizations of partially or boundedly rational players and games played by such players. If one takes the view that a process of decision-making in economic or other social situations constitutes 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? 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.

Topics of interest include:


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Document last modified on November 1, 2004.