Short Course: Game Theory with Queueing Applications

ACEMS is pleased to host Professor Moshe Haviv from the Department of Statistics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, at The University of Melbourne in September.

Professor Haviv holds a PhD in operations research from Yale University. His research areas include queueing systems and strategic decision making in queues; models from non-cooperative and cooperative game theory; and numerical issues in Markov chains and Markov decision processes.

Professor Haviv will present a four-day short course on the topics of n-player games, one against many symmetric games, and social versus individual optimisation.

The course is free to attend, but spaces are limited.

To register for the event, head to the ACEMS Eventbrite page, and make sure you sign up for all four days: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/game-theory-with-queueing-applications-tickets-48546441714

List of topics:

1. n-player games:

• strategies, proles and payoffs
• dominant and dominated strategies. Eliminating dominated strategies. The prisoner dilemma. Breass paradox
• the minimax criterion
• mixed strategies
• minimax with mixed strategies
• Nash equilibrium. Existence and non-uniqueness
• symmetric games and evolutionary stable strategies (ESS)
• examples:
  • (a) Cournot and von Stackleberg production games
  • (b) when to arrive to a queue
  • (c) competition among service providers

2. One against many symmetric games:

• Nash equilibrium and ESS
• avoid the crowd and follow the crowd
• queueing examples:
  • (a) to queue or not to queue: Javon's paradox
  • (b) a cab or a bus? the Downs-Thompson's paradox
  • (c) to purchase priority or not
  • (d) server selection models

3. Social vs individual optimization:

• externalities
• symmetric optimal solutions
• mechanism design and regulation
• regulating arrivals to a queue - the unobservable case:
  • entry fees and externalities
  • auctioning priority
  • random priorities
• regulating arrivals to a queue - the observable case:
  • queue dependent and queue independent entry fees
  • purchasing priority level
  • the not-FCFS regime
  • selecting waiting slots

References
[1] Fundenberg, D. and J. Tirole (1991), Game Theory, The MIT Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts.

[2] Hassin, R. and M. Haviv (2003), To queue or not to queue: Equilibrium
behavior in qeuues,, Kluwer.

[3] Kreps, D.M. (1990), A Course in Microeconomic Theory, Princeton Uni-
versity Press, Princeton, New Jersey.

[4] Osborne, M.J. (2004) Introduction to Game Theory, Oxford University
Press, Oxford.

[5] Osborne, M.J. and A. Rubinstein, (1994), A course in Game Theory,
The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.