Algorithmic game theory

Noam Nisan, a computer science professor at Hebrew University, recently started a blog on algorithmic game theory. If you’re like me, you immediately wondered what this even means—a topic handled in the first real post:

When Eva Tardos, Vijay Vazirani, Tim Roughgarden and myself were editing our book on Algorithmic game theory we knew that we wanted to cover this general area (from a somewhat focused perspective due to our theoretical-CS background), but we were not really sure what to call it — neither the book nor the area. Christos had a strong opinion what the field should be called Algorithmic Game Theory, so we decided to stick with that for our book as well. While the name itself is somewhat imprecise (I personally am missing “Internet”, “Markets”, and “Computation” in the name, but you can’t have it all in a snappy name), it seems that Christos’s naming for the field is sticking, so I’m going with it.

So far, the posts are all quite readable and interesting; I expected something a little more dense and intimidating.