Event details

Speaker:
Prof. em. Wolfgang Spohn & Dr. Mantas Radzvilas, University of Konstanz / CASCB

This event is part of an event series „Seminar Series Summer Semester 2023“.

Dependency equilibria and their evolutionary dynamics

Nash equilibria are the fundamental notion of game theory. They are characterized by the causal and hence (though this is a fallacy) probabilistic independence of the choices of the players. The notion of a dependency equilibrium (invented in 2003) is a natural generalization of that notion, which allows probabilistic (though not causal) dependence between those choices. (It differs from the notion of a correlated equilibrium well established since 1974.) Dependency equilibria are well suited to explain cooperation among the players. For instance, cooperation in the prisoners' dilemma and fair division in the ultimatum game are dependency equilibria. (These games have many dependency equilibria.) The talk will briefly explain this notion and emphasize that it is indeed meaningful. We have also studied various kinds of evolutionary dynamics and the extent to which they converge to such dependency equilibria. The main purpose of the talk is to present some instructive examples of those dynamics.

Wolfgang Spohn: PhD 1976 on "The Conceptual Foundations of Decision Theory", Habilitation 1984 on "A Theory of Causality", both at the University of Munich, professorships at the University of Regensburg (1986-91), the University of Bielefeld (1991-96), and then for philosophy and philosophy of science at the University of Konstanz (1996-2018), since 2019 senior professor at the University of Tübingen. Lakatos Award 2012 of the London School of Economics, Frege Prize 2015 of the Society of Analytic Philosophy, fellow of the Leopoldina and the Academia Europaea, since 2020 PI of the Koselleck project on "Reflexive Decision and Game Theory".

Mantas Radzvilas: MSc 2010, PhD 2016 at the Department of Philosophy, Logic, and Scientific Method of the London School of Economics, postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Biomedical Sciences and Public Health, Marche Polytechnic University, Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, LMU, and Sidney M. Edelstein Center Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and since 2021 at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Konstanz. Research interests lie at the intersection of philosophy of science and advanced microeconomic theory, particularly epistemic game theory, evolutionary game theory, and mechanism design theory.

Join the Talk on Zoom