[Colloquium] THEORY SEMINAR: Vijay Vazirani on November 9, 2010

[Katie Casey]

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Date: Tuesday, November 9, 2010 
Time: 3:00 p.m.
Place: Ryerson 251, 1100 E. 58th Street

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Speaker:		Vijay Vazirani

From:		Georgia Institute of Technology

Web page:	http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~vazirani/

Title: 		The “Invisible Hand of the Market”: Algorithmic Ratification and the Digital 					Economy

Abstract:  

	“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, 
that we expect our dinner, but from their regard for their own interest.”  
Each participant in a competitive economy is “led by an invisible hand to 
promote an end which was no part of his intention.”
 
                                                    Adam Smith,  1776.
 

With his treatise, The Wealth of Nations, 1776, Adam Smith initiated the field of economics,
and his famous quote provided this field with its central guiding principle. The pioneering
work of Walras (1874) gave a mathematical formulation for this statement, using his notion of
market equilibrium, and opened up the possibility of a formal ratification.
 
Mathematical ratification came with the celebrated Arrow-Debreu Theorem (1954), which 
established existence of equilibrium in a very general model of the economy; however, an efficient 
mechanism for finding an equilibrium has remained elusive.
 
The latter question can clearly benefit from the powerful tools of modern complexity theory and 
algorithms, and was taken up in the earnest within theoretical computer science a decade ago. 
In this talk, we will provide a summary of key developments. We will also describe a fascinating 
new direction, for the theory of algorithms, that has emerged from this work.

A compelling new issue is extending this deep understanding of markets to the digital 
economy -- because of some fundamental reasons, the methodology outlined above does not carry 
over to the digital realm. We will outline recent progress on this issue.      

Based on in part on:
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~vazirani/NBalg.pdf
and
http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.4586


Refreshments will be served prior to the talk at 2:30 in Ryerson 255.
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