18. May 2017, 16.15 p.m. 

Ernst-Abbe-Platz 2, seminar room 3423

Dilemmas in Game theory and their solution

Dr. Vijayakumar Sasidevan
(FIAS Frankfurt and IMSc Chennai, India)

Strategic interactions occur all around us in a multitude of forms and analyzing them in terms of games is a promising approach for understanding the behavior of a wide variety of socio-economic and biological systems. Game dilemmas represent situations in which “individually reasonable behavior leads to a situation in which most are worse off than they might have been otherwise.” A large number of strategic interactions in our surroundings belong to this category. The origin of such dilemmas – which has ramifications for diverse phenomena observed in biological, sociological and economic arenas – can be traced to some of the fundamental assumptions of game theory. In this talk after a discussion of some examples of game dilemmas such as Prisoners Dilemma, Game of Chicken and the trapping state problem in a Minority Game, I will discuss the recently proposed Co-action solution to games which resolves the game dilemmas in a natural way. The framework of co-action solution shows that contrary to the popular wisdom, there is no conflict between individually “nice” behavior and collective benefit in game dilemmas and leads to many interesting conclusions.