Week-long Workshop on Mean Field Games and Applications
Konstantin Riedl, Ph.D. Student in the team of Prof. Fornasier (Department of Mathematics, TUM) and researcher of the IEAI’s Project “Online Firestorms and Resentment Propagation on Social Media: Dynamics, Predictability, and Mitigation,” participated in a week-long workshop (4-8 May 2020) on “Mean Field Games (MFG) and Applications“ organized by the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM).
MFG theory studies the strategic decision-making process for a large system of interacting agents, where each single player has negligible impact on the overall system. This allows to mathematically analyze the mean-field limit of the multi-agent system, giving the area of research its name. As an exemplary application of the theoretical findings from this field, one can consider the opinion formation process by imposing game rules which, e.g., award herding behavior within this process or alternatively aim to polarize.
The workshop was particularly relevant to the goals of the “Online Firestorms and Resentment Propagation on Social Media: Dynamics, Predictability, and Mitigation” Project and Mr. Riedl’s research.