SPEAKER: Christine Chung

TIME: Wednesday 12-1pm, May 9, 2007

PLACE: NSH 1507

TITLE: Stochastically stable states in load balancing and atomic congestion 
games

ABSTRACT:
Price of Anarchy (POA) results assume players in a game will arrive at a Nash 
equilibrium.  Nash equilibrium has been criticized for unrealistically 
assuming that players are infinitely rational and have common knowledge of 
rationality.  We show that POA upper bounds can apply even when boundedly 
rational decision-making agents use simple strategy selection rules to arrive 
at what economists Foster and Young termed "stochastically stable" states.  
We also show that in some games these stochastically stable states are the 
Nash equilibrium states that are socially optimal.