Sustainability of Cooperation in a Class of Stochastic Games

AKSB 1617, Beirut campus & Frem Civic Center 401, Byblos campus via videoconferencing

The Department of Economics at LAU is hosting a seminar titled: “Sustainability of Cooperation in a Class of Stochastic Games” by Dr. Georges Zaccour.

Abstract

Many problems in economics, engineering, and management science have the following three features in common: (a) They involve only a few agents (players), which have interdependent payoffs, that is, the action of any player affects the payoffs of all. (b) The agents cooperate or compete repeatedly over time, and the problem involves an accumulation process, e.g., production capacity, pollution stock. (c) Some of the parameter values are uncertain. A natural framework to deal with such problems is the theory of dynamic games played over event trees (DGPETs).

If the players decide to coordinate their strategies by signing a long-term contract, then they must ensure that all players will follow their cooperative commitments as time goes by.

In this talk, I discuss different approaches to sustain cooperation over time in DGPETs and illustrate their applications in the context of design of international environmental agreements.

About the Speaker

Georges Zaccour holds the Chair in Game Theory and Management and is a full professor at HEC Montréal’s Department of Management Sciences. He holds a PhD in Management Science and an M.Sc. in International Business from HEC Montréal, and a Licence in Mathematics and Economics from Université Paris-Dauphine. He served as director of the GERAD, an inter-university research center, and director of the Marketing Department and the PhD program at HEC Montréal. His research areas cover differential games, optimal control and operations research applied to marketing, the energy sector and environmental management, areas in which he has published more than 130 papers and co-edited thirteen volumes. He coauthors the books Differential Games in Marketing and Games and Dynamic Games. His research is regularly funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He is editor-in-chief of Dynamic Games and Applications and associate editor of International Game Theory Review, Environmental Modeling & Assessment, Computational Management Science, INFOR and other journals. He is a fellow of The Royal Society of Canada and was the president of the International Society of Dynamic Games (2002-2006).