CRCS Lunch Seminar
Date: Monday, September 28, 2015
Time: 11:30am – 1:00pm
Place: 33 Oxford St., Maxwell Dworkin 119
Speaker: Lior Seeman (CRCS Postdoctoral Fellow)
Title: I’m Only Human: Game Theory with Computationally Bounded Agents
Abstract: Rationality in games and decisions is traditionally understood as requiring that agents act optimally. However, as pointed out by Simon [1955] acting optimally might be hard. We study how the analysis of games and behaviors changes when agents are assumed to be rational but computationally bounded, and thus cannot always act optimally.
Our work addresses different aspects of this question. We first argue that observed "irrational'' human behaviors can be explained by viewing people as computationally bounded agents that are doing as well as they can, given their limitations. This will be the main focus of this talk.
A second aspects of this work is to develop appropriate models of computationally bounded agents, and study the implications of these models and use these models to analyze different aspect of economic systems.
In this talk we will argue that by modeling people as bounded finite automata doing "the best they can", we can capture at a qualitative level the human behavior observed in experiments. This is done in a setting of a decision problem with incomplete information and a dynamically changing world, which can be viewed as an abstraction of many real-world settings.