Genesis and objective

The CompEcon (abbreviation for Computational Economics) group was formed after a reading group with the same name had been started in the summer of 2018. The reading group consists of faculty members from CSE and Econ, and students (undergraduate and graduate) from various departments. From the beginning, the idea was to foster discussion among multiple disciplines that uses ideas of game theory and mechanism design either directly or indirectly. The reading group meets during the semesters tentatively once in every fortnight. We have a speaker who presents either an original piece of his/her research, or a paper that is of the group's interest. The goal is to understand new ideas/theorems/experiments from these papers and share that with the group members. Apart from these, the enthusiastic group members (photos and mention below) travel to present their papers, create AI tools based on the research, attend workshops for idea exchange, travel for internships, and finally, celebrate over food. Please see the 'News' section below for recent updates. If you want to join our mailing list, please request for membership with your brief introduction.

Research approach

The group actions can be divided into four stages

1. Training and preparation: since this group works in the problems of social choice and mechanism design, the first phase is to train the workforce for this area of research. This is done through a basic game theory and mechanism design course, CS 6001/405, followed by an advanced course on topics in mechanism design, CS 6002. If needed, some other relevant courses are also recommended.
2. Idea development: through the readings and presentations of the CompEcon reading group, the people find new, creative ideas of research. This part is critical for the later stages.
3. Action: in this stage, the ideas are transformed into new results. We spend some time in formal writing to improve the writing skills. This results are then disseminated among peer reviewers.
4. System building: last but not the least, we also spend time in translating the theoretical ideas into usable tools for people to use in their daily lives. One developing tool is the peer-grading tool (more details will come soon).

Group photo(s)

Resources for the group members

1. In pass 1, I read the model, contributions (if the authors have not mentioned it explicitly, read their claims in the abstract), and the statements of the results (not into the proof yet). It may be possible that I'm uninterested in the model/results, in that case, this will be the time to leave the paper.
2. In pass 2: if pass 1 was interesting, I'll read the claims in detail, including the relevant proofs, and sometimes critically to understand if the paper actually making more claims than it proved. If the paper still stands, move to pass 3.
3. Pass 3 is a consolidation pass -- I have already read the claims and their proofs, and/or believe them to be true. In this final phase, I'm putting the different pieces together from pass 1 and 2 to understand what new things I learned from this paper. Which things could be improved, which assumption could have been relaxed, does it apply to any of the existing problems I'm considering, etc.

Principal Investigator

Current and past members

External Collaborators