CS 598 RM: Administrivia

About This Course

The first half of the course will provide a broad introduction to games and market models, solution concepts, classical as well as recent developments in the field on equilibrium computation & complexity, price of anarchy, auctions, and others. The second half will address a selection of advanced topics and research projects.

Coursework:

Course grades are based on

• 4-5 Homeworks (30% total)
• Final exam (25%)
• Project (40%)
• Class participation (5%)

There may be opportunities for extra credit with the homeworks. (The extra credit earned will be applied after the curve.)

Prerequisites

This is a graduate level class and some background in algorithms and discrete mathematics will be assumed. Knowledge of some probability and linear programming would be useful. Attempt will be made to make the material accessible to interested non-theory students. Consult the instructor if you have questions.

For review of the prerequisite material, we strongly recommend the following online resources.

• Building Blocks for Theoretical Computer Science by Margaret Fleck, written specifically for CS 173.
• Mathematics for Computer Science by Eric Lehman, Tom Leighton, and Albert Meyer, written for the Mathematics for Computer Science course at MIT.

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Reading Material

There is no required textbook. Pointers to existing lecture notes from various sources will be posted to the course web site as the semester progresses.

Course materials elsewhere

• Stanford
• MIT
• Cornell

Textbooks:

• N. Nisan, T. Roughgarden, E. Tardos, and V. Vazirani (editors), Algorithmic Game Theory, 2007. (Book available for free online.)
• T. Roughgarden, Twenty Lectures on Algorithmic Game Theory, 2016
• M. Osborne and A. Rubinstein, A Course in Game Theory, 1994.
• R. Myerson, Game Theory: Analysis of conflict, 1991.

Homeworks and grading

The homeworks are to be submitted on Compass2g. Type-written submissions are preferred, but hand-written are acceptable only if your handwriting is extremely pretty to look at.
No late submissions unless any deadline extension is announced. For any regrade requests, please go to office hours.

Project report

The format to be used is LLNCS. Here is the package including the class(.cls) file. Here is an example template.
The report should start with a title, author names, and the abstract. The page limit is 10 pages excluding references. More material should go in the appendix. Do not change the margins or font size (11pt). Reports that deviate too much from the specified format may lose points.