by sfab358 | Dec 11, 2024
Hosted by: Centre for Mathematical Social Science (CMSS), The University of Auckland, New Zealand
Event Timing: Afternoons of February 20th-21st, 2025
The final program of the event will be made available on this website, closer to the time of the event.
by sfab358 | Dec 11, 2024
We are pleased to host a two-day event, on Thursday & Friday, 20 & 21 February 2025, with mornings devoted to a mini-course and guest lectures by Professor Rabah Amir from the University of Iowa, and afternoons devoted to research talks by CMSS members, research students, and other interested scholars from the region. For more info about the mini-course and to register for it by the set deadline of Monday, 10 February 2025, please visit https://forms.gle/XkaeRrZ7yqKCCP4z9
[Please also see related call for submissions to be considered for inclusion in the final program of the workshop linked to this event, as available at https://forms.gle/Zk2HYi25tUB6pKD16 – Submissions are due by Monday, 13 January 2025]
Rabah Amir is a prominent Professor of Economics based at the University of Iowa. He has a PhD from the University of Illinois and was a Research Fellow at the Cowles Foundation, Yale University (1985). From 1985-1990 he was Assistant Professor in Economics and Applied Mathematics & Statistics, at the S.U.N.Y. at Stony Brook. After that he was researcher at the University of Dortmund in Germany and at the Universit ́e Catholique de Louvain, Belgium. From 1995-1997 he was Senior Fellow, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB), and from 1997-2000 Professor of Economics at Odense University, Denmark and at the Center for Industrial Economics, University of Copenhagen. He was Professor at the School of Economic Studies at the University of Manchester, UK (2000-2001) at the Universit ́e Catholique de Louvain, Belgium (2001-2004). From 2004-2012 he was Eller Professor, at the Eller School of Management Department of Economics, University of Arizona, USA, and since 2013 he is the J. Edward Lundy Professor of Economics at the University of Iowa. Prof Amir received the Handelsbanken Research Prize of Denmark in 1998 and was selected as an Economic Theory Fellow in 2011 by the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory, elected to Council member of the Game Theory Society in 2015 and elected Fellow of the Game Theory Society in 2020. He is ranked among the top 5% economists by the database IDEAS. One of his main research topics is the study of strategic substitutability and complemen- tarity in economics and their consequences to answer issues in industrial organisation, game theory or microeconomics. He uses mathematical modelling to address topics across a variety of subject areas and applications.
The purpose of the mini-course is to provide a presentation of some selected topics in the theory of supermodular optimisation and games along with some of the associated applications in economics.
The common thread of many of the topics will be economic complementarity. While the treatment will rely directly on research papers and will thus be quite advanced, a definite attempt will always be made to arrive at a self-contained exposition of the main concepts. A simplified introduction to some of the relevant mathematical notions will be given whenever necessary. Economic applications, mostly to models in Industrial Organisation, will form a significant part of the course.
The list of topics is as follows. The first two bullet items will be fully accessible to all PhD students, as only basic mathematics for economists will be assumed known.
- Supermodular optimization and comparative statics
Elementary introduction to Topkis’s Theorem with scalar variables and its basic economic applications in familiar settings. This follows my survey article, Amir (2005).
- Games with strategic complementarities
Formal definition; Existence of pure-strategy Nash equilibrium; Partial coincidence of solution concepts; Equilibrium comparative statics; Learning and pure-strategy equilibrium; various applications, in particular to consumer theory, oligopoly theory and industrial organization (including Cournot and Bertrand competition).
- Mathematical treatment of Supermodularity (on demand from audience only)
This is a complete introduction to lattice theory to treat the multi-dimensional case, and Topkis’s Theorem in full generality.
References
1. R Amir (2005), Supermodularity and complementarity in economics: An elementary survey, Southern Economic Journal, 71, 636-660.
2. D. Topkis (1998), Supermodularity and complementarity, Princeton University Press.
by sfab358 | Aug 19, 2024
The Centre of Mathematical Social Science (CMSS) was pleased to host a one-day specialised transdisciplinary workshop on the themes of mis- and dis-information featuring two research groups based respectively at Victoria University of Wellington (VUW) and the University of Auckland (UOA) talking about their research projects focussing on those themes.
When: Tuesday, 27 August 2024, 10:30am to 12:30pm & 2pm to 4pm
Venue: Room 260-307 [City Campus, Sir OGGB, level 3, room 307, 12 Grafton Road, Auckland – see map]
Guest speakers from VUW were:
Further invited speakers and contributors were:
The event was held in person, but remote access was guaranteed for interested attendees wanting to join online.
Convenor: Simona Fabrizi — CMSS Co-Director and Coordinator/Leader of the Infodemic Project
The workshop was sponsored via the Transdisciplinary Ideation Fund, awarded to Simona Fabrizi as a PI in the 2023 round and running until the end of 2025. The support of the Vice-Chancellor Office of the University of Auckland for the advancement of the Infodemic Project is also kindly acknowledged.
The CMSS is a transdisciplinary research centre with members from fields, including mathematics, economics, computer science, philosophy, and statistics. Research covers areas such as decision-making, social choice, voting, social networks, game theory, and experimental economics.
by sfab358 | Oct 26, 2023
The Centre of Mathematical Social Science (CMSS) is pleased to announce a one-day workshop on a broad range of issues in Political Science. The main topic will be on voting rules and elections but other related topics will be considered as well. In particular, the following may be of interest:
– the impact of various voting rules on minorities (be they smaller political parties or ethnic minorities);
– design of elections (eg., redistricting problems in the USA);
– MMP and the postmortem to the NZ 2023 elections.
Invited speakers:
– Bernard Grofman (University of California, Irvine)
– Jon Fraenkel (Victoria University of Wellington)
When: Thursday, 1 February 2024
Venue: Old Government House, University of Auckland
To read more about the program of the event, please visit the following URL address: https://sites.google.com/view/cmss-political-science-day/home
The CMSS is a transdisciplinary research centre with members from fields, including mathematics, economics, computer science, philosophy, and statistics. Research covers areas such as decision-making, social choice, voting, social networks, game theory, and experimental economics.
If you are willing to participate (no participation fee applies but the workshop dinner may be at your cost) get in touch with one of the co-directors of the centre.
Simona Fabrizi and Arkadii Slinko, CMSS Co-Directors
by sfab358 | Aug 18, 2023
On 17 August 2023 we hosted a transdisciplinary roundtable, facilitating a conversation about “Resilient Democracies: On the role of trust, participation and combatting disinformation” featuring speakers with expertise in economics, mathematics, political theory, and international politics. You can find a recording of the session here. For photos taken on the day, follow this link.
One of the guest speakers, Professor Massimo Morelli also contributed a public lecture on “The Shift to Commitment Politics and Populism” later that day (see related CEPR Discussion Paper for more on this, or alternatively, read this working paper version) — access the recording of this public lecture on YouTube here — , and gave an interview in the media on related topics to those discussed in the roundtable and the public lecture, which you can read more about here.
With Guest Speakers:
Accompanied by co-Panellists:
- Simona Fabrizi, co-Director of the CMSS and Senior Lecturer from the Dept of Economics at the University of Auckland
- Arkadii Slinko, co-Director of the CMSS and Professor from the Dept of Mathematics at the University of Auckland
And Moderated by:
- Robert MacCulloch, Matthew S. Abel Chair of Macroeconomics from the Dept of Economics at the University of Auckland
by sfab358 | Jul 27, 2023
A link to the recording of the lecture on YouTube can be found here
For photos taken on the day, follow this link
Speaker: Massimo Morelli (Bocconi University)
Title of the talk: “The Shift to Commitment Politics and Populism” [working paper version – slides & recording of the public lecture]
Date, Time and Venue: Thursday, 17 August 2023, 5.15pm – 6pm, Registration, drinks & canapés, Level 1 Foyer, Sir OGGB, 6pm – 7.30pm, Lecture and Audience Q&A, Sir OGGB, Room OGGB 5, Level 0
Abstract: The decline in voters’ trust in government and the rise of populism are two concerning features of contemporary politics in Europe and United States. In the lecture I plan to introduce a model of commitment politics that elucidates the interplay between distrust and populism. Candidates supply policy commitments to mitigate voters’ distrust in government, shrinking politicians’ levels of discretion typical of representative democracies. Alongside commitments, candidates rationally choose the main strategies associated with populism, namely anti-elite and pro-people rhetoric. With novel data on voters’ distrust towards the U.S. federal government, which we match with the Twitter activity of more than 2,000 candidates over five congressional elections, we show that distrust is strongly associated with candidates’ supply of commitments and populist rhetoric, which are also effective strategies at mobilizing distrustful voters. I also plan to show that the shift to commitment politics determines greater aversion to checks and balances, and hence even illiberal populism can emerge. Free media, judiciary independence, and professional bureaucrats, are all “agencies of restraint’’ of an executive, and hence the voters who prefer the policy commitments of their chosen candidate to executive power prefer the reduction of strength of all such agencies.
Bio: Massimo Morelli has been elected Fellow of the Econometric Society – and Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory – mostly for his contributions to bargaining, political economy and economics of conflict, while his current work also deals with causes and consequences of populism and law and economics in general. He obtained a PhD in economics from Harvard in 1996 and went back to Italy (Bocconi) in 2014, after having taught at multiple universities in the US, including Columbia University. He has been an active member of the Council of the European Economic Association and is now chairing the Minorities in Economics (MinE) committee, with a growing passion for all diversity and inclusion concerns.
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