Professor Rene van den Brink
On October 26, 2017, TGU Center for Positive/Empirical Analyses of Political Economy at Waseda University organized the seminar “Network centrality measures and cooperative graph game solutions” by Professor Rene van den Brink of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Professor van den Brink is an expert of a research field called cooperative game theory. This theory aims to mathematically analyze the cooperative relationships in society.
In modern society, there are many networks that connect economic agents. In a network, some agents have many connections to others, while some agents have few. Professor van den Brink introduced the concept of centrality measure, which measures the strength of connections. Using this, he introduced a solution concept that represents the power of each agent in a network. An example of the application of this theory is the internet, a network connecting many webpages. Using the solution concept, we can derive a ranking representing the popularity of webpages.
Many graduate students attended the seminar. They asked many questions, and a very fruitful discussion took place.
