Pablo Parrilo, Nov 2010

Pablo Parrilo will be visiting Caltech on 23 Nov 2010 (Tue). Sign up for a time to meet with him below.

Agenda

9:30a	Open
10:15a	Richard Murray (109 Steele)
11:00a	Seminar: 214 Steele
12:00p	Lunch with John, Keith, Houman, Steven L, Ather (faculty: add your name to the list if you want to come)
1:30p	Nader (Annenberg)
2:15	John Doyle (Annenberg)
2:30p	CDS 212 (Annenberg)
4:00p	Genti (Annenberg)
4:45p	Necmiye (Steele)

Seminar

FLOWS AND DECOMPOSITIONS OF GAMES: HARMONIC AND POTENTIAL GAMES

Pablo A. Parrilo (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Tuesday, November 23, 2010
11:00 AM to 12:00 PM
Steele 214

Exact potential games are those where the preferences of the strategy profiles of the different players are globally consistent, and therefore the players' payoffs can be aggregated through a joint function. In this talk, we analyze the general situation where there are local or global inconsistencies between the preferences of the different players. For this, we introduce a natural decomposition of multiplayer games in terms of potential and harmonic components. Besides its intrinsic interest, this decomposition facilitates the study of equilibrium and convergence properties of natural game dynamics. We discuss the implications for cooperative control problems, pricing schemes, and efficiency loss, and illustrate the results and techniques through an example of power control in wireless networks. Joint work with Ozan Candogan, Ishai Menache, and Asu Ozdaglar (MIT), http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.2405