6th congress 2021, Budapest

Harsanyi Lecture: Oliver Hart

Oliver Hart is a British-born American economist, currently the Andrew E. Furer Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Together with Bengt R. Holmström, he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2016.
Oliver Hart is an expert on contract theory, theory of the firm, corporate finance, and law and economics. His research centers on the roles that ownership structure and contractual arrangements play in the governance and boundaries of corporations. He has used his theoretical work on firms in two legal cases as a government expert (Black and Decker v. U.S.A. and WFC Holdings Corp. (Wells Fargo) v. U.S.A.) where companies claimed tax related benefits as a result from selling some of their business. The government used Hart’s research to claim that because the companies retained control of the sold assets, they could not lay claim to the tax benefits.

Morgenstern Lecture: Douglas Bernheim

B. Douglas Bernheim is an American professor of Economics, currently the Edward Ames Edmunds Professor of Economics at Stanford University; his previous academic appointments have included an endowed chair in Economics and Business Policy at Princeton University and an endowed chair in Insurance and Risk Management at Northwestern University’s J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Department of Finance. He has published many articles in academic journals, and has received a number of awards recognizing his contributions to the field of economics.

Title and Abstract of the Prize Lecture, given on July 20^th, 2021:

Positive Welfare Economics

Welfare Economics, the study of economic well-being, consists of two separate branches, one concerning individual well-being, the other concerning social aggregation. The first branch includes the standard revealed preference paradigm as well as tools from Behavioral Welfare Economics. The second branch subsumes work on social choice and welfare.

Vast literatures study these issues from a normative perspective. They ask, how should we evaluate individual well-being? How should we determine overall social welfare? The normative principles that have emerged from these inquiries have proven useful in innumerable applications.

The objective of this research agenda is to study these issues from a positive perspective. We ask, how do people actually evaluate what is good and bad for other individuals? How do they actually aggregate to reach conclusions about social welfare?

Research in positive welfare economics is valuable because it helps us understand why societies adopt particular policies. With respect to aggregation, it helps us understand how people think their societies ought to balance majority preference against the protection of minorities, judgments which (arguably) their elected representatives ought to respect. It also helps us understand how behavioral considerations, such as cognitive biases, can influence policy formation.

This work departs from most (but not all) of the literature on social preferences by focusing on outcomes for others without implicating selfish concerns.

von Neumann Lecture: Josef Hofbauer

Joseph Hofbauer is an Austrian mathematician, currently the Professor of Biomathematics at the University of Vienna. He graduated from the same university and then spent time at Northwestern, the University of Alberta at Edmonton and the Collegium Budapest. He specializes in dynamical systems and their applications in the field of biomathematics as well as evolutionary game theory where he worked with Karl Sigmund.

Title and Abstract of the Prize Lecture, given on July 19^th, 2021:

(Dynamic) Stability of Nash Equilibria

(open) problem: which Nash equilibria of a bimatrix game are stable under the replicator dynamics.

Shapley Lecture: Aislinn Bohren

Aislinn Bohren studies various topics in microeconomics with a focus on models of information and how individuals interact in dynamic settings. Her research explores questions related to learning under model misspecification, discrimination, information aggregation, moral hazard and the econometrics of randomized experiments. Her work on discrimination has both theoretical and empirical components, and builds on my research on learning under model misspecification. Her work in the other four areas is theoretical, and includes applications to designing rating systems, information campaigns and committees, and providing incentives in online labor markets.

Title and Abstract of the Prize Lecture, given on July 20^th, 2021:

Learning with Heuristics and Misspecified Models

Game Theory and Computer Science (Kalai) Prize: Yakov Babichenko and Aviad Rubinstein

Yakov Babichenko received his Ph.D. from Hebrew University in 2012 and is now Associate Professor in the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion. His research interest is in game theory. He is interested in adaptive learning in games and the rate of convergence of these adaptive processes, as well as in the complexity of equilibria in games in several models such as computational complexity, communication complexity, and query complexity.

Aviad Rubinstein is an assistant professor at Stanford. He was previously a Rabin postdoc at Harvard and completed his PhD at UC Berkeley. His research explores the frontier between what can and cannot be computed efficiently.  

Title and Abstract of the Prize Lecture, given on July 19^th, 2021:

Communication Complexity of Approximate Nash Equilibria

For a constant ε, we prove a P(N) lower bound on the (randomized) communication complexity of ε-Nash equilibrium in two-player N by N games. For n-player binary-action games we prove an exp(n) lower bound for the (randomized) communication complexity of ε-Nash equilibrium. The implications of these results on the rate of convergence of dynamics to Nash equilibria are discussed.