Computer Science and Game Theory: A Brief Survey

There has been a remarkable increase in work at the interface of computer science and game theory in the past decade. Game theory forms a significant component of some major computer science conferences (see, for example, [Kearns and Reiter 2005; Sandholm and Yakoo 2003]); leading computer scientists are often invited to speak at major game theory conferences, such as the World Congress on Game Theory 2000 and 2004. In this article I survey some of the main themes of work in the area, with a focus on the work in computer science. Given the length constraints, I make no attempt at being comprehensive, especially since other surveys are also available, including [Halpern 2003; Linial 1994; Papadimitriou 2001], and a comprehensive survey book will appear shortly [Nisan et al. 2007]. The survey is organized as follows. I look at the various roles of computational complexity in game theory in Section 2, including its use in modeling bounded rationality, its role in mechanism design, and the problem of computing Nash equilibria. In Section 3, I consider a game-theoretic problem that originated in the computer science literature, but should be of interest to the game theory community: computing the price of anarchy, that is, the cost of using decentralizing solution to a problem. In Section 4 I consider interactions between distributed computing and game theory. I conclude in Section 6 with a discussion of a few other topics of interest.