Professor Monica Cojocaru awarded NSERC Discovery Grant and Discovery Accelerator Supplement

We are pleased to announced that Department of Mathematics and Statistics professor Monica Cojocaru has been awarded a $120,000 NSERC Discovery Grant and $120,000 Discovery Accelerator Supplement to focus on the development of the notion of generalized Nash games (GNE), tackling questions of existence of solutions for such games, computational methods for finding these solutions, and the role this modelling concept can play in applied problems of populations.

General Nash games were introduced in the 50’s, and represent, in layman terms, models of noncooperative behaviour among players whose strategy sets together with their payoff functions, depend on the strategy choices of other players. In contrast, the much more widely known concept of a Nash game refers to noncooperative behaviour between players whose payoffs functions only depend on the others’ choices. The popularity of GNE as a modelling framework is not (by far) as wide as that of the usual Nash games. This is due to the fact that solving GNE poses very complex mathematical difficulties and both existence theory for solutions and computational methods vary depending on the subclasses of GNE under investigation (i.e., with shared constraints, linear, without shared constraints, convex, differentiable payoffs, etc.). They arise however organically in models of resource allocations (under common budget constraints), on health policy modelling, and in environmental modelling. 

This research will address two overarching questions: the benefits of knowing/computing GNE states in a given model; and the dissemination in various applied communities (population health, operations research, economics) of GNE results as relevant to these disciplines.