Postdoctoral fellow, MIT
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Abstract
Network aggregative games
Many of today’s most promising technological platforms and systems involve large numbers of independent and autonomous users making decisions while interacting and communicating one with each other. Examples are vast and include smart electrical grids, intelligent transportation systems, online markets (such as eBay and Amazon) and, more recently, sharing platforms (such as Uber and Airbnb). The dimension of such systems together with their complex network of interconnections calls for a modeling framework that goes beyond traditional economic and game theoretical approaches. Network aggregative games have recently been suggested as a promising tool to describe such strategic interactions in a concise yet comprehensive way. Specifically, network aggregative games assume that the cost function of each agent is coupled to the rest of the population only via an aggregate of the strategies of its neighbors, as defined by the underlying interaction network.
In this presentation, we illustrate our recent work which uses a variational inequality formulation to develop a unified theory for studying existence, uniqueness and sensitivity analysis of equilibria in network aggregative games. Our results can be used to analyse games with multidimensional and constrained strategies, that feature both strategic complements and substitutes. Our sensitivity analysis provides a powerful and tractable approach for studying changes in the equilibrium due to perturbations or parameter variations in the agents’ cost functions, thus allowing a systematic analysis of questions like systemic risk in networks or targeted advertising in online markets.
Bio
Francesca Parise was born in Verona, Italy, in 1988. She received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. de- grees (cum Laude) in Information and Control Engineering from the University of Padova, Italy, in 2010 and 2012, respectively. She conducted her master thesis research at Imperial College London, UK, in 2012. She graduated from the Galilean School of Higher Education, University of Padova, Italy, in 2013. She defended her PhD at the Automatic Control Laboratory, ETH Zurich, Switzerland in 2016 and she is currently a Postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), M.I.T., USA.
Her research lies at the intersection of network economics and engineering, where she applies tools from control, optimization and game theory to the analysis of complex systems composed by a large number of agents interacting over a network. Applications span from socio-technical systems, such as smart electrical grids, intelligent transportation systems, online markets and sharing platforms, to systems biology.
She received the Guglielmo Marin Award from “Instituto Veneto di Lettere ed Arti” for her research on complex systems and the Early Postdoc Mobility Fellowship from the “Swiss National Science Foundation”.