Club Meeting on 6 March 2012

Post date: 05-Mar-2012 08:14:46

Date & Time: Tuesday, 6 March 2012, 1pm-2pm

(Registration starts at 12.45pm)

Place: The Hong Kong Bankers Club

43/F Gloucester Tower, The Landmark, Central, Hong Kong

Market Crisis and Rationality

by

David W. K. Yeung

SRS Consortium for Advanced Study in Cooperative Dynamic Games

Hong Kong Shue Yan University

&

Center of Game Theory

Faculty of Applied Mathematics-Control Processes

Saint Petersburg State University

Abstract of the Talk

At the dawn of this millennium, two of the gravest problems that the global market economy has ever faced emerged -- the devastating Euro-debt deadlock and the catastrophe-bound industrial pollution problem. The most appealing characteristic of the perfectly competitive market is the postulation that individually rational self-maximizing behaviours would bring about group (Pareto) optimality. However, the market would fail to be an efficient mechanism if there exist imperfect market structure, externalities, imperfect information or public goods. The current global market structure is dominated by multinational corporations, asymmetric information and strategic externalities. As a result though the market is one of the most effective instruments in conducting economic activities it fails to guarantee its efficiency. From a game-theoretic point of view self-maximizing behaviours would and did bring about jointly irrational and devastating market crises. The talk will cover essential elements of an effective remedy to market crisis in the global financial arena and that in catastrophe-bound industrial pollution.

About the Speaker

Prof. Dr. Dr.h.c. David W. K. Yeung is Distinguished Research Professor and Head of Business Administration at Shue Yan University, and Kantorovich Research Chair and Co-director of Centre of Game Theory at Saint Petersburg State University. He is also Distinguished Honorary Professor of Qingdao University - an honor he received along with Nobel laureates John Nash, Reinhard Selten and Robert Aumann. Yeung’s pioneering academic works include the notion of subgame consistency, randomly furcating differential games, Yeung’s irrational-behaviour-proof condition, cooperative games with asynchronous players’ horizons, endogenous horizons differential games, Yeung’s Lemma, the Yeung Number, discrete-time random-horizon Bellman equation and HJB equations, and the Lotka-Volterra-Yeung density function.

In economics, Yeung extended the Saint Petersburg tradition led by Leonid Kantorovich’s Nobel Prize winning work in optimal resource allocation to multiple-agent subgame consistent economic optimization.

Yeung obtained his BSocSc in economics and statistics from the University of Hong Kong and his PhD in mathematical economics from York University. He studied in the Doctor of Science (Doktor Nauk – Continental European higher doctorate above PhD) program in applied mathematics at Saint Petersburg State University and was awarded the University’s highest degree of Dr.h.c. for his outstanding contributions in differential games.

He serves as Managing Editor of International Game Theory Review, Guest Editor of Annals of Operations Research, Associate Editor of Dynamic Games & Applications, Associate Editor of Operations Research Letters, and on the Board of Editors of Mathematical Game Theory & Applications.

Yeung and Leon Petrosyan co-authored the world’s first book on Cooperative Stochastic Differential Games. They also co-authored the world’s first book on Subgame Consistent Economic Optimization. Both books have been praised as classics of their fields.

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Guests and Visiting Rotarians are always most welcome at our weekly luncheons.

(Please register online in advance)

Lunch Cost : HK$300 (by cash) / HK$310 (by credit card)