Economics and Computation

Course overview

Instructor: Lirong Xia (xial@rpi.edu). Please call me Lirong.
Time: Monday, Thursday 10:00 am - 11:50 am
Location: J-ROWL 2C13.
Office hours:
- by appointment
- Piazza
All lecture notes are here. Please login with your RPI Box account after activation, and do not share anything outside this class.

Schedule (subject to change)

Week	Date	Topic	Slides	Project/Homework
1	8-28	Introduction, Simultaneous-move games	Intro pdf, ppsx Computation pdf, ppsx Game theory pdf, ppsx	Sign up on Piazza
1	8-31	Equilibrium computation	same as above
2	9-4 Labor day, no class
	9-5 Monday schedule	Existence	same as above
	9-7	Sequential-move games	same as above
3	9-11 Add deadline	Correlated equilibrium, algorithmic game theory	same as above	Homework 1 (game theory)
3	9-14	Auctions	pdf, ppsx
4	9-18	Mechanism Design	pdf, ppsx	Homework 2 (mechanism design and matching)
4	9-21
5	9-25	Social Choice: voting	pdf, ppsx
5	9-28	Social Choice: strategic manipulation	pdf, ppsx	Homework 3 (social choice)
6	10-2	Wisdom of the Crowd	pdf, ppsx
6	10-5	Preference Modeling	pdf, ppsx
7	10-9 Columbus day, no class
7	10-12	Matching	pdf, ppsx	Project proposal due
8	10-16
8	10-19 (10-20) drop deadline
9	10-23
9	10-26
10	10-30	Hongliang Chi Aaron Lockwood Aidan McHugh Michael Roberts and Alex Montes
10	11-2	Armend Murtishi S M Rayeed Jaeseok Kang and Jaeman Park Dorian Bilelis Benjamin Avrahami
11	11-6	Noah Pedroso Theodore Wu Ran Hu and John Nichols Jui Chien Lin Michael Chen
11	11-9
12	11-13	Hongliang Chi Armend Murtishi Aaron Lockwood Aidan McHugh Michael Roberts and Alex Montes S M Rayeed Jaeseok Kang and Jaeman Park
12	11-16	Dorian Bilelis Benjamin Avrahami Noah Pedroso Theodore Wu Ran Hu and John Nichols Jui Chien Lin Michael Chen
13	11-20
13	11-23 Thanksgiving, no class
14	11-27	Hongliang Chi Armend Murtishi Aidan McHugh Michael Roberts and Alex Montes S M Rayeed Jaeseok Kang Jaeman Park
14	11-30	Aaron Lockwood Dorian Bilelis Benjamin Avrahami Noah Pedroso Theodore Wu Ran Hu and John Nichols Jui Chien Lin Michael Chen
15	12-4	guest talk: Josh Kavner
15	12-7	guest talk: Qishen Han		Final report due
16
16

Textbook

(In progress) D. Parkes and S. Seuken. Economics and Computation.
L. Xia. Learning and Decision-Making from Rank Data.
Y. Shoham and K. Leyton-Brown, Multiagent Systems: Algorithmic, Game-Theoretic, and Logical Foundations, 2009.
N. Nisan, T. Roughgarden, E. Tardos and V. Vazirani, Algorithmic Game Theory, 2007.

General Class Policies

Website and Announcements. We will make extensive use of piazza and the course website. You are responsible for checking the course website regularly for announcements and course materials, as well as your e-mail for communications related to the class.
Lectures. Students are highly encouraged to attend all classes. You are responsible for all material covered and announcements made in lecture.
Laptops and Electronic Devices. No laptops or other electronic devices are allowed in lecture, excpet that you use it for in-class polling. Even if you are diligently taking notes on your laptop, the bright screen and the activity is extremely distracting to the people behind you. Because of this, "movie theater" rules apply: no laptops, phones, or other devices with a screen on them should be out during lecture, except for in-class polling. After the polling, you must turn it off. Students who continually disrupt the class will be asked to leave.

Grading

Project and presentations 60%. Students can team up (no more than 2 students per group, in rare cases 3 might be possible but please discuss with Lirong)

Some published projects from past years

Benjamin Kelly. Gerrymandering under Uncertain Preferences. Proceedings of AAAI-22 (student abstract).
Joshua Kavner, Lirong Xia. Strategic Behavior is Bliss: Iterative Voting Improves Social Welfare. In Proceedings of NeurIPS-21. [arXiv]
Shreyas Sekar, Sujoy Sikdar, and Lirong Xia. Condorcet Consistent Bundling with Social Choice. In Proceedings of AAMAS-17.
David Hughes, Kevin Hwang, and Lirong Xia. Computing Optimal Bayesian Decisions for Rank Aggregation via MCMC Sampling. In Proceedings of UAI -15.

Vote to decide the weights of the following two components (40% in total)
- Participation is calculated by number of times the student take polls at OPRA (does not matter whether the student answer is correct, so please come and vote)
- Exam

Homeworks

There will be 3 homeworks. However, please do not turn in your homework. Ask questions on Piazza for help.
The bottom line is: HWs are the best practices for the exams. (If there are exams).

Projects and Presentations

Project proposal. The format is similar to a typical conference paper in CS, for example any published projects listed above. Please try to address the following questions. There is generally no requirement in the length but please make sure that the problems are addressed as much as you can.

What is the problem?
Why is it important?
What has been done? (Give references if you can.)
Why previous work cannot solve the problem?
How am I going to try to solve the problem?
What is my timeline?

First presentation. Each group has 15 min to cover the same set of questions listed above (in the proposal). Please remember to include a timeline.
Second presentation.Each group has 10 min to (1) quickly remind the audience about the problem, (2) discuss the progress since the first presentation, and (3) present an updated timeline.
Third (final) presentation. Each group has 15 min to (1) introduce the problem (shorter than the first presentation but longer than the second presentation), (2) present the overall approaches, discuss the conclusions, what worked what doesn't, etc., (3) future work, pretending that you will continue the project.
Final report. This could either be like a submission to an academic conference or a scientific blog post.

Academic dishonesty

Student-teacher relationships are based on trust. For example, students must trust that teachers have made appropriate decisions about the structure and content of the courses they teach, and teachers must trust that the assignments that students turn in are their own. Acts which violate this trust undermine the educational process. No collaboration, or any electronic devices, is allowed during exams. Violating the above policy may result in a failing grade for the class.

Acknowledgements

Thanks Felix Brandt, Yiling Chen, Ulle Endriss, Vincent Conitzer, David Parkes, Sven Seuken, Ariel Procaccial, Sven Seuken for offering tremendous helps on developing the course!