The three papers that were awarded the Gödel Prize in 2012 deal with the analysis of equilibria for certain resource allocation problems. The term “equilibrium" refers to the fact that the solutions to these problems depend on the behaviour of selfish players, and one assumes that an equilibrium such as e.g. the Nash equilibrium is a possible, stable outcome. It is well known that such equilibria may be suboptimal in terms of some central objective function, and maybe surprisingly, this is even true when this central objective function is the sum of the users’ objectives. Today, the degree of inefficiency of equilibria is well known as the price of anarchy. Congestion games, and more specifically network routing games are the showcase problems in that area. The talk gives a (subjective) view on some recent results in that area, some of them based on my own work with several coauthors.

Einladung von Prof. Nicole Megow