The Positronic Economist: A Computational System for Analyzing Economic Mechanisms

Abstract

Computational mechanism analysis is a recent approach to economic analysis in which a mechanism design setting is analyzed entirely by a computer. For games with non-trivial numbers of players and actions, the approach is only feasible when these games can be encoded compactly, e.g., as Action-Graph Games. Such encoding is currently a manual process requiring expert knowledge; our aim is to simplify and automate it. Our contribution, the Positronic Economist is a software system having two parts: (1) a Python-based language for succinctly describing mechanisms; and (2) a system that takes such descriptions as input, automatically identifies computationally useful structure, and produces a compact Action-Graph Game.

Cite

Text

Thompson et al. "The Positronic Economist: A Computational System for Analyzing Economic Mechanisms." AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2017. doi:10.1609/AAAI.V31I1.10592

Markdown

[Thompson et al. "The Positronic Economist: A Computational System for Analyzing Economic Mechanisms." AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2017.](https://mlanthology.org/aaai/2017/thompson2017aaai-positronic/) doi:10.1609/AAAI.V31I1.10592

BibTeX

@inproceedings{thompson2017aaai-positronic,
  title     = {{The Positronic Economist: A Computational System for Analyzing Economic Mechanisms}},
  author    = {Thompson, David R. M. and Newman, Neil and Leyton-Brown, Kevin},
  booktitle = {AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
  year      = {2017},
  pages     = {720-727},
  doi       = {10.1609/AAAI.V31I1.10592},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/aaai/2017/thompson2017aaai-positronic/}
}