Prof. Dr. Felix Brandt
Patrick Lederer, René Romen

Seminar SS 2021

Economics and Computation

Content

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in topics at the intersection of economics and computer science, as witnessed by the continued rapid rise of research areas such as algorithmic game theory and computational social choice. This development is due to the emergence of computational networks such as the Internet as well as the need to get a grip on algorithmic questions in economics.
The emphasis in this seminar lies on the independent study of classic economics papers, but also, and in particular, more recent papers from computer science. Among the topics to be covered are matching theory, mechanism design, and voting theory.

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**Registration (please read carefully)**

Seats are split up between students from computer science and students from other programs. All interested students should attend the overview meeting and This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., describing their background (including relevant courses) and motivation (up to 250 words) as well as 2-5 papers they are interested in. (Own suggestions of new papers are welcome!) Deadline for applications: February 1, 2021 (11:59pm). Students from computer science and mathematics additionally have to use the matching system for indication of interest. Notifications will be sent out at the end of Februrary and include assignment of papers and supervisors. Registration in TUMonline will be taken care of by the lecturers; no further action is required.

Technical details

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, it is unlikely that the seminar meetings happen in person. Currently, we plan to run all meetings virtually using Zoom.We recommend to use the zoom client application and familiarize yourself with this application before the presentation.

Time and venue

Overview (Vorbesprechung):

Thursday, January 28, 14.00 - 15.00, Slides

First meeting (Kick-Off):

~ April, 14.00 - 15.00

Talks:

~ May, 9.00 - 17.00
~ June, 9.00 - 17.00

Selection of articles 📚

Matching and Allocation

A. Abdulkadiroglu and T. Sönmez. House allocation with existing tenants. Journal of Economic Theory, 88(2):233–260, 1999.

A. Abdulkadiroglu and T. Sönmez. School choice: A mechanism design approach. American Economic Review, 93(3):729—747, 2003.

A. Bogomolnaia and H. Moulin. A new solution to the random assignment problem. Journal of Economic Theory, 100(2):295–328, 2001.

S. Bouveret and M. Lemaître. Characterizing conflicts in fair division of indivisible goods using a scale of criteria. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 30:259–290, 2016.

S. J. Brams and A. D. Taylor. An envy-free cake division protocol. The American Mathematical Monthly, 102(1):9–18, 1995.

A. Cseh. Popular matchings. In U. Endriss, editor, Trends in Computational Social Choice, chapter 6. AI Access, 2017.

A. Damamme, A. Beynier, Y. Chevaleyre, and N. Maudet. The power of swap deals in distributed resource allocation. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), pages 625–633. IFAAMAS, 2015.

D. Kurokawa, A. D. Procaccia, and J. Wang. Fair enough: Guaranteeing approximate maximin shares. Journal of the ACM, 65(2), 2018.

A. E. Roth, T. Sönmez, and M. U. Ünver. Pairwise kidney exchange. Journal of Economic Theory, 125:151-188, 2005.

Coalition Formation

H. Aziz, F. Brandl, F. Brandt, P. Harrenstein, M. Olsen, and D. Peters. Fractional hedonic games. ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation, 7(2), 2019.

H. Aziz, F. Brandt, and P. Harrenstein. Pareto optimality in coalition formation. Games and Economic Behavior, 82:562–581, 2013.

A. Bogomolnaia and M. O. Jackson. The stability of hedonic coalition structures. Games and Economic Behavior, 38(2):201–230, 2002.

J. Hajdukovà. Coalition formation games: A survey. International Game Theory Review, 8(4):613–641, 2006.

Voting

H. Aziz, M. Brill, V. Conitzer, E. Elkind, R. Freeman, and T. Walsh. Justified Representation in Approval-Based Committee Voting. Social Choice and Welfare, 48(2):461-485, 2017.

F. Brandt, C. Geist, and D. Peters. Optimal bounds for the no-show paradox via SAT solving. Mathematical Social Sciences, 90:18–27, 2017.

F. Brandt, C. Saile, and C. Stricker. Strategyproof social choice when preferences and outcomes may contain ties. 2019. Working paper.

V. Conitzer, T. Sandholm, and J. Lang. When are elections with few candidates hard to manipulate? Journal of the ACM, 54(3), 2007.
Possibly combined with: J. Bartholdi, III, C. A. Tovey, and M. A. Trick. The computational difficulty of manipulating an election. Social Choice and Welfare, 6(3):227–241, 1989.

J. Duggan and T. Schwartz. Strategic manipulability without resoluteness or shared beliefs: Gibbard- Satterthwaite generalized. Social Choice and Welfare, 17(1):85–93, 2000.

P. Faliszewski, P. Skowron, A. Slinko, and N. Talmon. Multiwinner voting: A new challenge for social choice theory. In U. Endriss, editor, Trends in Computational Social Choice, chapter 2. 2017.

C. Geist and D. Peters. Computer-aided methods for social choice theory. In U. Endriss, editor, Trends in Computational Social Choice, chapter 13, pages 249–267. AI Access, 2017.

R. Meir. Iterative voting. In U. Endriss, editor, Trends in Computational Social Choice, chapter 4. 2017.

P. Tang and F. Lin. Computer-aided proofs of Arrow’s and other impossibility theorems. Artificial Intelligence, 173(11):1041–1053, 2009.

H. P. Young. Optimal voting rules. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 9(1):51–64, 1995.

N. Aswal, S. Chatterji, and A. Sen. Dictatorial domains. Economic Theory, 22(1):45-62, 2003.

H. Moulin. On strategy-proofness and single peakedness. Public Choice, 35(4):437-455, 1980.

Other resources

Feedback guidelines (1) (2) [in addition to what is presented during the first meeting]

Practicalities

The seminar will be held in English (i.e., all presentations will have to be in English, too)

Module-Codes

IN2107 (Master-Seminar in the Master program Informatik)
IN0014 (Seminar in the Bachelor programs Informatik, Wirtschaftsinformatik)
For all other programs: Please check first whether this seminar fits in your curriculum. For example, mathematics students should find it listed as a mathematics seminar, too.

Contact