Computational Analysis of Intelligent Agents: Social and Strategic Settings

Title of dissertation: COMPUTATIONAL ANALYSIS OF INTELLIGENT AGENTS: SOCIAL AND STRATEGIC SETTINGS Anshul Sawant, Doctor of Philosophy, 2016 Dissertation co-directed by: Prof. V.S. Subrahmanian, Department of Computer Science Prof. Mohammad Taghi. Hajiaghayi, Department of Computer Science The central motif of this work is prediction and optimization in presence of multiple interacting intelligent agents. We use the phrase ‘intelligent agents’ to imply in some sense, a ‘bounded rationality’, the exact meaning of which varies depending on the setting. Our agents may not be ‘rational’ in the classical game theoretic sense, in that they don’t always optimize a global objective. Rather, they rely on heuristics, as is natural for human agents or even software agents operating in the real-world. Within this broad framework we study the problem of influence maximization in social networks where behavior of agents is myopic, but complication stems from the structure of interaction networks. In this setting, we generalize two well-known models and give new algorithms and hardness results for our models. Then we move on to models where the agents reason strategically but are faced with considerable uncertainty. For such games, we give a new solution concept and analyze a real-world game using out techniques. Finally, the richest model we consider is that of Network Cournot Competition which deals with strategic resource allocation in hypergraphs, where agents reason strategically and their interaction is specified indirectly via player’s utility functions. For this model, we give the first equilibrium computability results. In all of the above problems, we assume that payoffs for the agents are known. However, for realworld games, getting the payoffs can be quite challenging. To this end, we also study the inverse problem of inferring payoffs, given game history. We propose and evaluate a data analytic framework and we show that it is fast and performant. COMPUTATIONAL ANALYSIS OF INTELLIGENT AGENTS: SOCIAL AND STRATEGIC SETTINGS