From rock-paper-scissors to European Parliament's politics

The success of the Hollywood movie "The Beautiful Mind”, a biographical drama film based on the life of the American mathematician John Nash, a Nobel Laureate in Economics, made Game Theory well-known all over the world. Started by John von Neumann (Neumann János) and with John C. Harsányi among its first Nobel laureates the field could qualify as a Hungaricum. Since then, Stag Hunt describing the trust dilemma, a conflict between safety and social cooperation originated with philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Prisoners' Dilemma have become part of popular culture but few know that Game Theory has a great number of practical applications. By applications we do not only mean textbook examples such as chess or remote problems such as the Cuban missile crisis but our everyday little conflicts in sharing a cake, raising kids or applying to college. In our presentation, after covering a number of simple applications, we show a number of results related to power in the EU, looking at the Council of the European Union and the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development (COMAGRI) of the European Parliament.

Professor Kóczy is an active supporter of the Hungarian culture and society: held various offices in the Cambridge University Hungarian Society and the Hungarian Student Association in Leuven (LEMDE) during his studies, is a founding member and former president of the Hungarian Society of Economics and is currently member of the board of KÁMME. He is married and has four children.

Lecturer: Prof. Dr. László Á. Kóczy, DSc.
Affiliation: Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary
Director of the Research Centre for Quantitative Social and Management Sciences
Scientific advisor at Centre for Economic and Regional Studies of the Eötvös Loránd Research Network

Professor László Á. Kóczy, doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, graduated from the University of Cambridge reading Mathematics and from the Catholic University Leuven (KU Leuven) in Economics, where he also completed his PhD under the supervision of prof. Luc Lauwers with the title "Solution Concepts and Outsider Behaviour in Coalition Formation Games. He has spent some time at Maastricht University before returning to Hungary. He was a vice dean at Óbuda University when he won the prestigiuos Momentum grant of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2011 to establish the Game Theory Research Group at the Institute of Economics, at the time part of the research network of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, currently in the Centre for Economic and Regional Studies of the Eötvös Loránd Research Network. He is also affiliated with the Budapest University of Technology and Economics where he is a professor and the director of the Research Centre for Quantitative Social and Management Sciences also offering courses at the Milestone Institute and Mathias Corvinus Collegium. He has published over 40 papers in the fields of cooperative game theory, voting, economic theory and scientometrics. He published his monograph on Partition function form games in 2018 at Springer.