I was asked which CS departments are recommended for getting your graduate degree in Algorithmic Game Theory (/Economics). This sounds like an excellent question to leave for commenters on my blog, but let me start with some of the obvious answers:
The three top CS departments are all excellent for AGT as well: Berkeley has the patriarch of the field, as well as an AGT-active networking group (Scott Shenker), and a whole related school of Information. MIT has Costis and, from the crypto side, Silvio (who in recent years has been forwarding a hostile takeover of mechanism design by crypto), as well as a network GT group, and the fantastic close-by microsoft reserach center. Stanford has Tim and, on the AI-ish side, Yoav, as well as strong AGT-friendly economists (Paul Milgrom, Ilya Segal), and close proximity to Silicon Valley and in particular to the excellent AGT reserach groups of Microsoft and of Google.
Other noteworthy places include:
- The very strong group in Cornell (Including Eva Tardos, Jon and Bobby Kleinberg, Joe Halpern and, from the crypto side, Rafael Pass).
- The EEconomiCS group in Northwestern (Lance Fortnow, Nicole Immorlica, Jason Hartline) with strong support from the business school (including Ehud Kalai, the unofficial AGT godfather within GT, and Rakesh Vohra, a major communication hub between Econ/GT, OR, and TCS).
- Liverpool has a strong Economics and Computation group.
- Israel has unusual presence in AGT, including Tel-Aviv, the Technion, and my own CS department at the Hebrew University (Jeff Rosenschein, Daniel Lehmann) with a strong supporting center for the study of rationality (including AGT reserachers Liad Blumrosen and Michal Feldman as well as many AGT-close economists, game-theorists, and mathematicians like Sergiou Hart, Gil Kalai, and Abraham Neyman).
So let me stop with this incomplete list, and ask readers for more suggestions.
I might add Harvard (Parkes, Chen + at least 3 postdocs in the area), University of Michigan (Wellman, Mackie-Mason, Sami, Chen, Adamic), Georgia Tech (Vazirani, Balcan), CMU (Sandholm), UPenn (Kearns, Ungar + the new MSSE), and Duke (Conitzer, Munagala)
Let me plug for UW, with Anna Karlin and proximity to Microsoft Research which has Kamal Jain.
I’ll also plug Harvard — Parkes, Chen, the Harvard Center for Research on Computation and Society and Berkman Center, and more than occasional interest from other theory faculty (most of us have worked with David on one or more things at this point…)
Just to support the popular movement in favor of Harvard, in fact our group now has *four* AGT/E postdocs (Ian Kash, Felix Fischer, Jenn Wortman-Vaughan, and myself), many brilliant grad students, and amazing action. Also don’t forget Harvard Business School and the Economics department, with AGT-friendly people such as Al Roth.
In addition to the names mentioned above, Stanford has several other people that dabble in AGT but tend to be overlooked as they’re not in the CS department: Ashish Goel, Ramesh Johari, Amin Saberi and Yinyu Ye.
For someone interested in GT/E (even with an “A” flavor), doing a PhD in Economics rather than CS would not be a crazy idea.
May I plug us (= USC)? Shanghua Teng, David Kempe, Milind Tambe, Postdoc Xi Chen.
There are some good folks in Aarhus, Denmark.
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which CS departments are recommended for getting your graduate degree in Algorithmic Game Theory??
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Dave already mentioned Kamesh and me (thanks Dave!), but Duke has a lot of relevant people outside CS as well that are very open to this area, some of whom can be found here: http://econ.cs.duke.edu/people.html
CMU now also has Ariel Procaccia.