Strategic Learning
Media
Lecture Details
Peyton Young is James Meade Professor of Economics at Oxford University and a Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at The Brookings Institution in Washington. He has published widely on game theory, bargaining and negotiation, public finance, political representation, voting, and distributive justice. His books include Fair Representation (Yale University Press, 1982), Fair Allocation (American Mathematical Society, 1985, ed.), Cost Allocation: Methods, Principles, Applications (North-Holland, 1985), Negotiation Analysis (University of Michigan Press, 1991), Equity in Theory and Practice (Princeton University Press, 1994), Individual Strategy and Social Structure (Princeton University Press, 1998), and Strategic Learning and Its Limits (Oxford University Press, 2004). Professor Young is President of the Game Theory Society, a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, and an External Faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute.
Over the past decade, game theorists have made substantial progress in identifying simple learning heuristics that lead to equilibrium behavior without making unrealistic demands on agents information or computational abilities, as is the case in the perfect rationality approach to game theory. Recent research shows that very complex, interactive systems can equilibrate even when agents have virtually no knowledge of the environment in which they are embedded. This talk will survey different approaches to the problem of learning in games, show the various senses in which learning rules converge to equilibrium, and sketch the theoretical limits to what is achievable.
