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Past CSIS Workshops

NSF/NBER/CEME Conference on Mathematical Economics

December 1-2, 2023

Organized by Peter Caradonna, Laura Doval (Columbia Business School), Luciano Pomatto, Omer Tamuz

The 2023 NSF/NBER/CEME Conference on Mathematical Economics in honor of Kim Border featured topics across economic theory. Kim Border (1952–2020) was a mathematical economist who was a member of the Caltech faculty for more than forty years. He made important contributions to reduced form auctions, decision theory and collective choice. He also co-authored "Infinite Dimensional Analysis: A Hitchhiker's Guide," a staple reference among economic theorists.


25+ Years of Quantal Response Equilibrium Conference

March 4-5, 2022

Organized by Marina Agranov, Marco Battaglini (Cornell University), Alessandra Casella (Columbia University), Cesar Martinelli (George Mason University)

The conference centered on the notion of the Quantal Response Equilibrium, which was formalized in the seminal paper "Quantal Response Equilibria in the Normal Form Games" by Richard McKelvey and Thomas Palfrey (Games and Economic Behavior, 1995). The QRE concept provides a parsimonious union of the game theoretic Nash equilibrium approach combined with a probabilistic choice model developed in psychology. Not long after the publication of this influential paper, the QRE quickly became one of the leading approaches used to fit experimental data and provide a natural framework for estimating the effects of a variety of behavioral factors.

The keynote speaker was Charles Holt (University of Virginia).

Confirmed participants included: Thomas Palfrey (Caltech), Jens Grosser (Florida State University), James Bland (University of Toledo), Evan Friedman (University of Essex), Paul Healy (Ohio State University), Matt Kovach (Virginia Tech), Ted Turocy (University of East Anglia), Rodrigo Velez (Texas A&M University), Alex Brown (Texas A&M University), Ed Hopkins (University of Edinburgh), Cary Frydman (USC), Gerelt Tserenjigmid (UC Santa Cruz), Yusufcan Masatlioglu (University of Maryland), Casey Crisman-Cox (Texas A&M University), and Oliver Compte (Paris School of Economics).

Website


Workshop on Information and Social Economics (WISE18)

July 26-28, 2018

Organized by Omer Tamuz, Ben Golub (Harvard), Manuel Mueller-Frank (IESE)

The workshop featured the latest research on social and economic networks and their connection with information economics. Topics included learning in networks, social influence, strategic interaction in networks, and peer effects.

Invited speakers included: Mohammad Akbarpour (Stanford), Itai Arieli (Technion), Yakov Babichenko (Technion), Aislinn Bohren (Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pennsylvania), Laura Doval (Caltech), Ignacio Esponda (UCSB), Mira Frick (Yale), Drew Fudenberg (MIT), Ben Golub (Harvard), David Hirshleifer (UC Irvine), Matthew Jackson (Stanford), Ilan Lobel (NYU), Teddy Mekonnen (Caltech), Manuel Mueller-Frank (IESE), Mallesh Pai (Rice), Luciano Pomatto (Caltech), Evan Sadler (Columbia), Lones Smith (Wisconsin), Rann Smorodinsky (Technion), Eduard Talamàs (UPenn), Omer Tamuz (Caltech), Leeat Yariv (Princeton), Junjie Zhou (NUS)

Website


The Southern California Symposium on Network Economics and Game Theory (NEGT)

January 12, 2018

Organized by Omer Tamuz

This symposium brought together students, professors, and researchers from Southern California who use game theory to analyze, design, and assess networked interactions across economics, computer science, engineering, management and other disciplines.

Invited speakers included: Haifeng Xu (USC), Jiasi Chen (UCR), Vijay Vazirani (UCI), Hamid Nazerzadeh (USC), Philipp Strack (UC Berkeley), Elchanan Mossel (MIT), Vahab Mirrokni (Google)

Website


The Social and Information Sciences Laboratory Summer Conference

August 17-18, 2017

Organized by Laura Doval

This conference was organized around the topics of misspecification, robustness, causality, and the design of experiments.

Invited speakers included: In-Koo Cho (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign), Ignacio Esponda (University of California, Santa Barbara), Kristof Madarasz (London School of Economics and University of Utah), Antonio Penta (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Pablo Schenone (Arizona State University), Philipp Strack (UC Berkeley), Sylvain Chassang (New York University), Marco Ottaviani (Bocconi University), Geoffroy de Clippel (Brown University)


WISE16: Workshop on Information and Social Economics

This workshop was held in Baxter Lecture Hall at Caltech on August 4-6, 2016. It featured the latest research on social and economic networks and their connection with information economics. Topics included learning in networks, social influence, strategic interaction in networks, peer effects, etc. There were paper presentations and informal discussions.

The Workshop webpage can be found here.

Organizers:


The Theory of Bringing Privacy into Practice

This workshop was held at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, CA on Friday, April 24, 2015. Katrina Ligett was the organizer of the event, and Moritz Hardt, Kobbi Nissim, and Aaron Roth were among the invited speakers.

Differential privacy has matured into a rich theory, with broad and exciting implications for many application areas. Transfer of these ideas to practice, however, has been slow, for a variety of social, legal, economic, and practical reasons. How can these challenges inform and inspire exciting new theory?

The goal of this workshop was to identify challenges and the opportunities they suggest for new theoretical work, and hence to contribute to the development of a broad agenda for increasing the influence and impact of ideas from the differential privacy literature.

The Workshop webpage can be found here.


Workshop on Social and Information Networks

This workshop was held on Monday, June 15, 2015 in Portland, Oregon, in conjunction with the 16th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (ACM EC 2015, held at FCRC 2015). The workshop brought together researchers and practitioners from academica and industry to discuss the latest developments in social and information networks.

More information can be found at the workshop's website.

Organizers:


2014 Network Science Workshop

The 2014 Network Science Workshop was hosted by the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, CA from April 25th - April 26th. The local organizer was Dr. Matthew Elliott, Assistant Professor of Economics.

The scope was as follows:
All Caltech and surrounding university faculty and scholars are encouraged to participate to learn about some of the latest developments in network science from the perspective of computer scientists, economists, sociologists and statisticians. Networks are being studied in many disciplines with both different questions being posed and different methodologies being leveraged to address the same questions. The workshop will bring together leading experts in networks from a variety of fields. The general program will feature six speakers throughout the day on Friday, each followed by a brief Q&A session, and Saturday will feature two additional speakers. Breakfasts and lunches will be provided for conference attendees who register. Coffee breaks will be complimentary.


SoCal NEGT

The Southern California Symposium on Network Economics and Game Theory is held annually in the Fall. This symposium brings together students, professors, and researchers from Southern California, who apply game theory to analyze, design, and assess the performance of networks. They highlight synergies between various related research areas, and encourage discussions regarding the benefits and limitations of game theory as a performance assessment and design tool for networks. Both the application of game theory to networking problems and the development of new game-theoretic methodologies that can be applied in that context are of interest.

Links to current and past symposia are below:

  • 2016 (hosted at UCLA)
  • 2015 (hosted at USC)
  • 2014 (hosted at Caltech)
  • 2013 (hosted at UCLA)
  • 2012 (hosted at USC)
  • 2011 (hosted at Caltech)
  • 2010 (hosted near UCLA)
  • 2009 (hosted at USC)

GRID 2020 Discussion Series

The GRID 2020 Discussion Series, held by the Resnick Institute at Caltech, is an informative series of discussions on the critical topics identified in the recent Resnick Report "Grid 2020, Toward a Policy of Renewable and Distributed Energy Resources." Sessions are held during the academic year.

Information about the next installments in the Series, as well as presentations and WebEx links for past installments, can be found at the Resnick Institute's website.


Workshop on Privacy and Economics

A Workshop on Privacy and Economics was held at Caltech from May 3-4, 2013. The goal of this workshop was to nurture a dialogue between data privacy researchers and economists. To encourage this, a workshop format was adopted that was perhaps foreign to the computer scientists, but familiar to the economists: each of about half a dozen plenary talks were paired with a prepared response from a leader from the other research area. The format helped to translate, identify, and interpret important concepts, results, and questions of common interest.

Information about the next Workshop on Privacy and Economics will be posted here when available.