A “Tragedy of the Commons" refers to scenarios in which individuals acting according to their own self-interest leads to over-consumption and the collapse of a shared common resource. A long-standing challenge is to understand the factors that enable cooperative behaviors to emerge, and consequently for tragedies to be averted. Two primary approaches involve devising incentive policies that discourage consumption behavior as well as understanding how individuals learn and make decisions, warranting the use of game-theoretic tools. A class of evolutionary game models known as “feedback-evolving games” has emerged as an effective framework to address these challenges. It considers a large population of individuals whose payoffs are endogenously coupled with a dynamically changing environmental state. In this talk, I will discuss recent results and opportunities for which feedback-evolving games can be extended along two important directions: 1) the impact of alternate agent learning rules that go beyond the well-studied replicator equation and 2) environmental interactions with multiple populations.
Keith Paarporn is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. He received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2013, an M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2016, and a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2018. From 2018 to 2022, he was a postdoctoral scholar in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a recipient of the NSF ERI Award (2024) and the computer science Tenure-track Faculty of the Year award at UCCS. His research interests include game theory, control theory, and their applications to multi-agent systems and security.
