[Female-math-faculty] Women in Math Fall Lecture Series

Kristine McGlynn kmcglynn at uwaterloo.ca
Tue Dec 2 15:26:54 EST 2014


Dear Women in Math,

On Friday, December 12th at 3:30 pm in M3 3103, the Fall Women in Math lecture will be delivered by Britta Peis, Professor of Management Science with the School of Business and Economics at RWTH Aachen University.

All are welcome to the talk; the title and abstract are below.

At 12.00 p.m. on Friday Britta will meet a small group of selected students for lunch. If you are interested in being one of them, please send an email<mailto:wim at math.uwaterloo.ca> to Women in Math.
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Title:  Resource Competition on Matroids

Abstract: Congestion games are widely used to model and analyze the behaviour of selfish acting uncontrolled individuals, competing over a commonly used set of resources. A typical example of congestion games can be observed every day at rush hour in a congested city: each individual car driver chooses a route through a street network. The travel time of each of the streets ("resources") in use highly depends on the congestion caused by the route choices of the other car drivers.

A stable state ("equilibrium") is reached if none of the individuals can improve its outcome by unilateral switching to an alternative route ("strategy"). The famous Braess paradox describes the interesting phenomenon that improving the network infrastructure, for example by building new streets, may in fact lead to higher travel times under an equilibrium.

Game theory now investigates under which conditions equilibria exist, are efficient, and admit a Braess paradox. As it turns out, structural properties and algorithmic techniques from Combinatorial                   Optimization can be extremely helpful for such investigations. For example, as will be shown in the talk, matroids are the only structures that are immune to Braess paradox, and that guarantee the existence of equilibria for several variants of congestion games. (Joint work with Tobias Harks).

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See upcoming WIM Events<http://math.uwaterloo.ca/women-in-mathematics/events>!


Laura Sanita
Assistant Professor
Women in Mathematics, Chair
Department of Combinatorics & Optimization
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, ON, Canada N2L 3G1

Phone: (519) 888-4567 Ext. 31395


[waterloo]

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