Reshef Meir: "Uncertainty, Bounded Rationality, and Strategic Voting"

CRCS Lunch Seminar

Date: Monday, November 3rd, 2014
Time: 11:30am – 1:00pm
Place: 33 Oxford St., Maxwell Dworkin 119

Speaker: CRCS Fellow Reshef Meir

Title: "Uncertainty, Bounded Rationality, and Strategic Voting"

Abstract:
I will describe a novel model for representing uncertainty in multi-player games, inspired by bounded-rationality and modal logic. More specifically, each player holds an uncertain, non-probabilistic, view of other players' actions.

While the model is quite general, I will focus on the widely-used Plurality voting rule, showing that the model has three main advantages over previous theories:
 (a) the optimal strategy of a voter reduces to a natural heuristic;
 (b) a voting equilibrium always exists, and is reached by any best-response dynamics; and
 (c) extensive simulations show that the resulting equilibria replicate known phenomena from real-world voting.

Time permits, I will discuss how a similar approach to uncertainty can be applied to understand strategic behavior in very different settings, including scheduling on Doodle and routing in networks.

The talk is based on joint works with Omer Lev, David Parkes, Jeffrey S. Rosenschein, and James Zou.
 
Biography:

I am a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS), on a two-year Rothschild fellowship. I have a B.Sc. in cognitive science and three degrees in computer science, all from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel. My main research areas are Computational Game Theory, Mechanism Design, and Bounded Rationality.
My PhD thesis on mechanisms that promote stability and welfare has won the Schlomiuk prize for outstanding PhD thesis (Hebrew University), an honorable mention for Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award (IFAAMAS), and the Michael B. Maschler Prize (Game Theory Society).