CAPUT Logic, Language and Information: Social Software

Second Semester 2005/2006
Institute of Logic, Language and Computation
Universiteit van Amsterdam

Intstructor: Dr Eric Pacuit

Class Meetings: Thursdays 13 - 15

Classroom: P.019

Course Language: English

Intended Audience: Masters of logic students

Content of the Course: Social software is an interdisciplinary research program that combines mathematical tools and techniques from game theory and computer science in order to analyze and design social procedures. This course will discuss introduce the field of social software. We will cover topics in game theory, social choice theory, formal epistomology, fair division algorithms, voting theory and logics for reasoning about social procedures (i.e., game logic, coalitional logic, ATL).

Evaluation: Some regular course work (homeworks), plus a paper and possibly a short presentation (details to be announced later).

Course Paper: A paper worth approximately 60% of your grade will be due the last week of the semester. You are free to choose the topic of the paper from any relevant paper (email me if you need help choosing a topic). A first draft must be handed in to me by April 27, 2006. Below is a suggestion of some possible topics.

• Choose one of the paradoxes/puzzles (allais paradox, ellsberg paradox, Brandenburger-Keisler Paradox, Newcomb's Problem, etc.) discussed in class an survey the literature surrounding the puzzle.
• Select a research paper relevant to social software and write a report of the paper. The main aim of your paper should be to make the topic of the paper accessible to your class mates (and to me). Apart from that, your paper should also have some modest original content, such as a new proof of an existing result, an improved presentation or casting an economics-related result in a fashion accessible to logicians or computer scientists.

Please email the topic of your paper no later than April 7, 2006.

Course Material: There is no textbook for this course. Information will be drawn from various sources, including research papers and textbooks. A list of relevant references can be found here (here is the .bib file). This file will be updated throughout the semester. A survey of many of the topics that will be discussed in this course can be found here.