From 1990 to 2012, the International Summer Festival on Game Theory at Stony Brook has been a renowned academic gathering of prominent game theorists and many leading economists from around the world. This year the tradition continues as the Game Theory Society holds the 24th Stony Brook Game Theory Festival at the Charles B. Wang Center July 8 through July 18.
The yearly festival — a general one-week international conference covering a broad spectrum of current research and two workshops on special topics — contributes to the international visibility of Stony Brook University’s Department of Economics as a premier site for teaching and research in game theory and its economic applications.
Approximately 200 participants come each year from Asia, Europe, and North and South America, among them 10 Nobel Laureates in economics: Kenneth Arrow, Robert Aumann, Gerard Debreu, Eric Maskin, Roger Myerson, John Nash, Alvin Roth, Thomas Schelling, Reinhard Selten and Lloyd Shapley. The focus of the summer activities has been not only on game theory, but on its applications, particularly in economics. Topics covered in past workshops include auctions, computer science, contract theory, evolutionary biology, experimental economics, finance, incomplete markets, industrial organization, innovation and patent licensing, international trade and development, law and economics, macroeconomics, mechanism design, neuroeconomics, political economy and political science.
2013 Festival Events
July 8 to July 12: International Conference on Game Theory
This conference will celebrate the 60th anniversary of 2012 Nobel Laureate Lloyd Shapley‘s papers on the Value and Stochastic Games, as well as Shapley’s 90th birthday. It will also pay tribute to Professor Jean-Francois Mertens, who passed away in July 2012. The organizing committee includes Robert Aumann, Sandro Brusco, Pradeep Dubey, Abraham Neyman and Yair Tauman. The scientific organizers are Bernard De Meyer, Universite de Paris 1, and Srihari Govindan, University of Rochester. The consulting committee includes Abraham Neyman, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Sylvain Sorin, Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris 6.
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July 14 to July 15: Workshop on Experimental Game Theory
The organizer is Drew Fudenberg, Harvard University.
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July 16 to July 18: Workshop on Computational Game Theory
The organizer is Bernhard von Stengel, London School of Economics.
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Both workshops will be held in Lecture Hall 2 at the Charles B. Wang Center.
About the Center
The Center for Game Theory in Economics grew out of the former Institute for Decision Sciences (IDS), which was established at Stony Brook University in 1989. The Center has organized 83 international conferences and workshops and has hosted more than 2,500 scientists since its establishment, with most of these activities funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). According to Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow, who reviewed the IDS several years ago, the resident and affiliated members of the Center constitute “a game theory group that is unequaled in the United States, if not in the world.”
The impact of game theory on economics and other disciplines in the social and natural sciences is pervasive. Its concepts and techniques have become commonplace in the study of industrial organization, international trade, bargaining, and the economics of information, to name just a few economic applications. Uses of game theory in non-economic areas include studies of legislative institutions, voting behavior, communication and persuasion, fashion, revolutions and popular uprisings, international conflicts, and evolutionary biology. Its impact was reflected in the 1994, 2005, 2007 and 2012 Nobel Prizes in Economics, which were awarded to nine game theorists.
Lloyd Shapley
American economist Lloyd Shapley, a professor emeritus at UCLA who held joint appointments in the departments of Mathematics and Economics, is a founding member of Stony Brook University’s Center for Game Theory, and remains an affiliated member who has participated in the summer conferences for the past 23 years. He won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences jointly with Alvin Roth. Shapley used cooperative game theory to study and compare different matching methods, analyzing how to efficiently match different economic agents. Shapley’s work is theoretical, but it has been applied by other scholars (including Alvin Roth) to many real world situations.
Jean-Francois Mertens
Jean-Francois Mertens was a founding member of the Center for Game Theory at Stony Brook, and remained an affiliated member until his death on July 17, 2012. He had profound influence on the shaping of the Center, on the content and structure of its summer conferences, and on the research of students and colleagues.
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