Advanced Decision Systems: Evolutionary Computation

Catalog description

This course is taught with the more descriptive title of "Agents, Games, and Evolution." It explores applications and fundamentals of strategic behavior. Strategic, or game-theoretic, topics arise throughout the social sciences. The topics include--and we discuss--trust, cooperation, market-related phenomena (including price equilibria and distribution of wealth), norms, conventions, commitment, coalition formation, and negotiation. They also include such applied matters as design of logistics systems, auctions, and markets generally (for example, markets for electric power generation). In addressing these topics we focus on the practical problem of finding effective strategies for agents in strategic situations (or games). Our method of exploration will be experimental: we review and discuss experiments, principally computational experiments, on the behavior of boundedly rational agents in strategic (or game-theoretic) situations. Course work includes readings, discussions in class (organized as a seminar), examinations, and a course project on a topic chosen by the participants.