In the Conference Network
Tenured HSE Professor Vladimir Matveenko, Associate Professor Alexey Korolev, and undergraduate economics student Anastasia Alfimova, presented the results of their research into network economics at six international conferences this summer.
Their joint paper ‘On dynamic stability of equilibrium in network game with production and externalities’ was selected for presentation at the 2nd European Conference on Social NetworksEUSN 2016 in Paris, the ‘Networks in the global world. Multiple Structures and Dynamics: Applications of Network Analysis to European Societies and Beyond’ conference in St. Petersburg, the 10th ‘Game Theory and Management’ conference in St. Petersburg, the 16th SAET Conference on Current Trends in Economics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the 12th European Meeting on Game Theory (SING12) in Odense, Denmark, and the 5th World Congressof the Game Theory Society (GAMES 2016) in Maastricht, the Netherlands.
Anastasia Alfimova, undergraduate economics student:
I presented our joint paper at two conferences in St. Petersburg. Both of them were international and their only working language was English. The NetGloW conference is very interesting, but it only started recently, and they haven’t honed the organizational process yet. The GTM conference, by contrast, where I presented our paper in the Networking Games and Applications section, was very well organized. My section was supervised by Professor Mazalov, Director of the RAS Institute of Applied Mathematical Research. He said that our paper was very interesting and asked me why we called the equilibrium ‘instable’, if, apart from small deviations, it always comes to the same corner solution. He meant that if the equilibrium always comes to the same state with the same initial addition, this cannot truly accurately be described as instability. I explained that we use ‘stability’ to refer to what happens when, with a small deviation, the equilibrium remains internal, and ‘instability’ to any that result in a corner solution. Another young researcher asked how we add dynamics to the model, and why we have two periods in the model, while when we look at each player in a network’s best responses to a changed environment, we have more periods (adjustment takes place until something becomes active or hyperactive).
I believe that I presented the paper quite well, since the audience seemed very interested, and after my presentation I got some feedback that the paper was interesting, as well as a couple of general questions (what externality means etc). I liked participating in this conference a lot!
Vladimir Matveenko, tenured professor at HSE:
Participation in good conferences is an essential component of research. First, it is a fast and easy way to learn about the most recent research results and trends in your area. Second, it is a way to learn what the colleagues think about your research results, and to get advice that may turn out to be very valuable. I’ll give an example. At the EUSN conference in Paris, someone in the audience said that they had heard a concept similar to the one we use in one of Sachs’s papers on spectral graph theory. We found out that Horst Sachs, a German mathematician, died this spring, and the quoted article was published long before the internet era and is still unavailable to us. But we used some related papers mentioning Sachs’s paper and found out about some little-known concepts in matrix theory, which are indeed very useful for our research. This kind of information exchange is what you expect at conferences.
Third, conferences mean meeting colleagues in person, supporting old academic relations and establishing the new ones, not only helping your own research, but also boosting our university’s development. It’s good that increasing numbers of international academic conferences take place in St. Petersburg and other Russian cities.
This year, Anastasia Alfimova and other undergraduate and MA students, whose term papers I supervised, including Maxim Bakhtin, Julia Skoblova, and Shamil Sharapudinov, spoke at academic conferences. This is important for the students both as a form of education, and as a step into their future professional life.