Tim Roughgarden: The Price of Anarchy

Tim Roughgarden is professor in the Computer Science and Management Science and Engineering Departments at Stanford University. He is also a very active science communicator, hosting a popular algorithms course on the Coursera online learningplatform.Among many recognitions,Tim has received theGödel Prize for hisresearch in computational game theory, a field that residesin theintersection of two disciplines:economics and computer science. We talk to Tim about one of the central insights of that work: the Prize of Anarchy, which quantifies the loss in efficiency of a system due to selfish behaviour of its agents.We also look at applications of game-theoretic algorithms in the real world, when Tim explains the role that computer science played in designingthe 2016“incentive auction” used to by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) tobuy and sell broadcast airwaves.