Dario Bauso - University of Sheffield, United Kingdom - "Evolutionary Game Dynamics for Collective Decision Making in Structured and Unstructured Environments"

Abstract:
For a large population of players we consider a collective decision making process with three possible choices: option A or B or no option. The more popular option is more likely to be chosen by uncommitted players and cross-inhibitory signals can be sent to attract players committed to a different option. This model originates in the context of honeybees swarms, and we generalise it to accommodate other applications such as duopolistic competition and opinion dynamics. The first contribution is an evolutionary game model and a corresponding new game dynamics called expected gain pairwise comparison dynamics explaining how the strategic behaviour of the players may lead to deadlocks or consensus. The second contribution is the study of equilibrium points and stability in the case of symmetric or asymmetric crossinhibitory signals. The third contribution is the extension of the results to the case of structured environment in which the players are modelled via a complex network with heterogeneous connectivity.

Bio-sketch:
Dario Bauso received his Laurea degree in Aeronautical Engineering in 2000 and his Ph.D. degree in Automatic Control and Systems Theory in 2004 from the University of Palermo, Italy. Since 2015 he has been with the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering, The University of Sheffield (UK), where he is currently Reader in Control and Systems Engineering. Since 2005 he has also been with the Dipartimento di Ingegneria Chimica, Gestionale, Informatica, Meccanica, University of Palermo (Italy), where he is currently Associate Professor of Operations Research. From 2012 to 2014 he was also research fellow at the Department of Mathematics, University of Trento (Italy). He has been academic visitor in several universities. From October 2001 to June 2002, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, University of California, Los Angeles. In 2010 he was short-term visiting scholar at the Department of Automatic Control of Lund University and at the Laboratory of Information and Decision Systems of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2013 he was visiting lecturer at the Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford (UK), and at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department of Imperial College London, London (UK). His research interests are in the field of Optimization, Optimal and Distributed Control, and Game Theory. Since 2010 he is member of the Conference Editorial Board of the IEEE Control Systems Society. He was Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control from 2011 to 2016. He is Associate Editor of Automatica, IEEE Control Systems Letters, and Dynamic Games and Applications.