BEYOND EQUILIBRIUM: PREDICTING HUMAN BEHAVIOR IN NORMAL FORM GAMES

KEVIN LEYTON-BROWN

University of British Columbia

It is standard in multiagent settings to assume that agents will adopt
Nash equilibrium strategies. However, studies in experimental economics
demonstrate that Nash equilibrium is a poor description of human players
initial behavior in normal form games. In this talk, I will describe a wide
range of widely studied models from behavioral game theory (BGT). For what
we believe is the first time, we evaluated each of these models in a
meta-analysis, taking as our dataset large-scale and publicly available
experimental data from the BGT literature. We also analyzed the parameters
of the best performing model, and identified ways of modifying it--and,
indeed, simplifying it--to improve performance. In the end, our work
demonstrates two surprising facts: one BGT model was consistently the
best, and people are smarter than behavioral game theorists had thought.

BIO

Kevin Leyton-Brown is an associate professor in computer science at the
University of British Columbia. He holds a Ph.D. and M.S. from Stanford
University (2003; 2001) and a B.S. from McMaster University (1998). Much
of his work is at the intersection of computer science and microeconomics,
addressing computational problems in economic contexts and incentive
issues in multiagent systems. He also studies the application of machine
learning to the automated design and analysis of algorithms for solving
hard computational problems. He has co-written two books, "Multiagent
Systems" and "Essentials of Game Theory," and over seventy peer-refereed
technical articles. He is the program chair for the ACM Conference on
Electronic Commerce (ACM-EC), and an associate editor of the Journal of
Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), the Artificial Intelligence
Journal (AIJ), and ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation. He split
his 2010-2011 sabbatical between Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda,
and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem,
Israel. He has served as a consultant for Trading Dynamics Inc., Ariba
Inc., and Cariocas Inc., and was a scientific advisor to Zite Inc. until
it was acquired by CNN in 2011.