ICTS

A short abstract of the talk:
Monetary Policy was for the last three decades, the policy of choice for macroeconomic stabilization. Currently, there are are open questions about the efficacy of monetary and fiscal policy and their current uses. In this talk I will go over the traditional mechanisms and the current concerns with macroeconomic management. I will discuss this in the Indian context and will end with briefly sketching some open areas of theoretical interest from scholars.

A short academic/professional biography:
Arjun Jayadev is a Professor of Economics and Senior Economist at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. He works on issues of finance, distribution, labor and intellectual property.

A short abstract of the talk:
TBA

A short academic/professional biography:
Nikita Kohli is an experienced researcher with a demonstrated history of working in the international affairs industry and military organizations. She is currently working as a researcher at the Centre for Land Warfare Studies (CLAWS), a think tank of the Indian Army, where she creates policy notes and research papers, in particular in the areas of strategic foresight and international security. She does focused research on terrorism trends and financing, foreign policy strategy, and weapon system analysis using Game Theory and Statistical and Mathematical modelling.
Nikita has previously worked with the Indian Mission to the United Nations in Geneva and Oxfam India. She has also worked as a consultant for and presented various papers before multiple different militaries, including the Indian and the US armies at the strategic level.

A short abstract of the talk:
The administration of the Energy Sector in India is distributed among 5 different ministries, which creates challenges in working towards a common long-term goal for the nation in terms of energy security. The talk would provide an overview of the Integrated Energy Modeling work that was done at NITI Aayog using the MESSAGE Modeling Framework.

A short academic/professional biography:
Dr Avik Sarkar has recently taken up the role of Professor in Data, AI and Public Policy at Indian School of Business. Dr Avik Sarkar was most recently Heading the Data Analytics Cell at NITI (National Institution for Transforming India) Aayog, a premier policy think-tank of the Government of India. At NITI Aayog, Dr Sarkar was in-charge of developing roadmap for use of data, analytics and artificial intelligence for Governance and Policy making along with providing analytical insights for policy making across sectors like Sustainable Development Goals, Direct Benefit Transfer, Innovation, Digital payments, Education, Healthcare/Nutrition, Agriculture, etc.
 
Dr Sarkar has over 18 years of experience across different aspects of data analytics, statistical modeling, data/text mining across companies like IBM, Accenture, Nokia, NASA, Persistent Systems, etc. In his last role at Accenture Consulting (Singapore), Dr Sarkar contributed to various data and analytics related engagements with Singapore Government. Dr Sarkar holds a PhD from The Open University (UK), Masters from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay and Bachelors from Calcutta University. Dr Sarkar has authored several technical publications and technology patents.

Dr Sarkar has been nominated among the "Top 10 Data Scientists in India" in 2017 by the Analytics India Magazine and nominated as "LinkedIn Influencer" in the Technology space in 2015 for contribution and engaging discussions on the LinkedIn platform in areas related of Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, etc.

A short abstract of the talk:
These talks will cover standard and non-standard solution concepts in the theory of games, including models of procedural rationality, with applications to public goods and common pool resources.

A short academic/professional biography:
Rajiv Sethi is a Professor of Economics at Barnard College, Columbia University and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is on the editorial boards of the American Economic Review and Economics and Philosophy. His current research deals with information and beliefs. In collaboration with Brendan O’Flaherty, he has examined the manner in which stereotypes affect interactions among strangers, especially in relation to crime and the criminal justice system. Their book, Shadows of Doubt: Stereotypes, Crime, and the Pursuit of Justice was published by Harvard University Press in 2019. With Muhamet Yildiz, he has explored communication among individuals who consider each other to have valuable information, but also believe that others are biased to different degrees in the manner in which they process information. In previous work they have examined public disagreement and private information flows, and in current work are exploring the implications of correlated biases within social groups. He is also part of an interdisciplinary team working on the forecasting of geopolitical events using methods that combine machine models with human judgment.

A short abstract of the talk:
Discerning the intentions and character of others is a difficult task. In the villages where I work in Tamil Nadu, religious practice is seen as particularly helpful in that process of discernment. There, religious acts are often quite dramatic: devotees walk across hot coals, pierce their skin with hooks and spears, walk barefoot to distant temples, and sacrifice animals to the divine. What do onlookers discern from these acts, and how do they shape people's relationships? Drawing on reputational and social support network data, I show that greater and costlier ritual participation corresponds to greater recognition not only for being devout, but also for holding a suite of prosocial traits. Perhaps more importantly, greater and costlier ritual participation also increases the likelihood of a supportive tie between individuals. And, supportive ties are more likely between those who participate in collective rituals together. These findings collectively give us some insight into the role of religion in society.

A short academic/professional biography:
Eleanor Power is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Methodology at the LSE. She completed her PhD in Anthropology at Stanford University in 2015. Prior to joining LSE in 2017, she was an Omidyar Postdoctoral Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. Eleanor's research explores questions regarding: the role of religion in society, the interaction between costly signaling and cooperation, gender differences in prominence and social capital, and the dynamics of gossip and social censure. She studies these topics primarily through fieldwork conducted in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where she has been working since 2009,using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, primary among which is social network analysis.

A short abstract of the talk:
I shall present how the process of evolution is modeled using nonlinear dynamical equations, specifically, replicator equations. Using a replicator map, it will be discussed how fixed points, periodic solutions, and chaotic solutions can be interpreted in the language of game theory. Also, connection between population games in finite and infinite populations will be discussed. Finally, through the networks of the replicator maps, we shall try to find relation between emergent synchronization and cooperation in strategic (evolutionary) games.

A short academic/professional biography:
My first introduction to the world of scientific research was through the problems of fluid dynamics. I have written quite a few papers on the problems of turbulence, magnetohydrodynamics, and astrophysical fluids. While I have used some numerical methods, the works have been more tilted towards the usage of mathematical and analytical methods. Moreover, I have kept a parallel interest of mine alive: nonlinear dynamics. Apart from my curiosity in the perturbative methods for nonlinear systems, I have studied many aspects of chaos, such as, synchronization, Hamiltonian chaos, and phase space reconstruction. 
Over last two years, I have been trying to understand the process of evolution through nonlinear dynamical systems. Some of my primary interests are: (i) understanding how dynamical solutions correspond to the game theoretic equilibria, (ii) evolution of cooperation in evolutionary games, and (iii) connection between population games in finite and infinite populations.

A short abstract of the talk:
A production economy can be modeled as a network of firms connected by input-output relationships. A static equilibrium of such a system can be characterised for standard production functions and assumptions about competition and prices. The relationship between the volatility of a node and the macroeconomic volatility can also be obtained in terms of network characteristics. In the presence of short-run non-substitutability of some inputs, we attempt to characterise the stability of the economy with respect to firm-specific shocks in terms of the characteristics of the input-output network having a combination of substitutable and non-substitutable goods.

A short academic/professional biography:
Anand Shrivastava is Assistant Professor of Economics and Programme Coordinator of the undergraduate programme at Azim Premji University. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Cambridge. He has worked on issue of conflict, public works and labour. He is a co-author on the State of Working India reports on employment in India. His current interest is in areas of computational methods including agent-based modeling and networks.

A short abstract of the talk:
We consider a classical dynamics for opinion evolution with some stubborn agents and the possibility of continuously influencing the opinions of a few selected agents, but under resource constraints. We view the opinion dynamics as a value iteration for policy evaluation for a stochastic shortest path problem with some non-classical constraints. We propose an online two time scale reinforcement learning based scheme for this optimization problem. Supporting numerical studies are provided.

A short academic/professional biography:
Alexandre Reiffers is a post-doctoral fellow at Robert Bosch Centre for Cyber Physical Systems. He received the B.Sc. degree in mathematics (2010) from the university of Marseille, the master degree in applied mathematics (2012) from the university of Pierre et Marie CURIE and the Ph.D. degree in computer science (January 2016) from the INRIA (National research institute in computer science and control) and the university of Avignon. His supervisors were Eitan Altman and Yezekael Hayel. From July 2016 to December 2017, Alexandre Reiffers was a researcher at SafranTech where he was working on comparison of maintenance strategies. Most of his research projects concern the application of mathematical tools (game theory, optimization, stochastic process and machine learning) for a better understanding of real-world problems. The different issues that he studies touch topics such as social networks, speech between human and computer, economy and manufacturing.

A short abstract of the talk:
These talks will cover standard and non-standard solution concepts in the theory of games, including models of procedural rationality, with applications to public goods and common pool resources.

A short academic/professional biography:
Rajiv Sethi is a Professor of Economics at Barnard College, Columbia University and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is on the editorial boards of the American Economic Review and Economics and Philosophy. His current research deals with information and beliefs. In collaboration with Brendan O’Flaherty, he has examined the manner in which stereotypes affect interactions among strangers, especially in relation to crime and the criminal justice system. Their book, Shadows of Doubt: Stereotypes, Crime, and the Pursuit of Justice was published by Harvard University Press in 2019. With Muhamet Yildiz, he has explored communication among individuals who consider each other to have valuable information, but also believe that others are biased to different degrees in the manner in which they process information. In previous work they have examined public disagreement and private information flows, and in current work are exploring the implications of correlated biases within social groups. He is also part of an interdisciplinary team working on the forecasting of geopolitical events using methods that combine machine models with human judgment.

A short abstract of the talk:
In recent years, there has been growing recognition of the potential of network structure to facilitate cooperation. "Network reciprocity," for example, has been put forth as a mechanism that can favour cooperation. However, the full implications of network dynamics for cooperation are as yet not fully explored. In this talk, I will outline some of the ways in which the nature of interpersonal interactions may add important complexity to our models and understanding of cooperation. Social relationships often entail repeated interactions of various behavioural types between individuals who are themselves indirectly connected. All of these features (repeated interactions, multiplex relationships, clustering) have the potential to impact the efficacy of the various mechanisms for the evolution cooperation. The consequences of network structure are particularly profound for humans, given our reliance on communication and the dynamics of information spread through networks. I will illustrate these dynamics with some ethnographic case studies from my fieldwork in rural South India, and I will discuss potential theoretical and empirical ways forward.

A short academic/professional biography:
Eleanor Power is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Methodology at the LSE. She completed her PhD in Anthropology at Stanford University in 2015. Prior to joining LSE in 2017, she was an Omidyar Postdoctoral Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. Eleanor's research explores questions regarding: the role of religion in society, the interaction between costly signaling and cooperation, gender differences in prominence and social capital, and the dynamics of gossip and social censure. She studies these topics primarily through fieldwork conducted in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where she has been working since 2009,using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, primary among which is social network analysis.

A short abstract of the talk:
The idea of optimizing individual good via a Nash optimization protocol is everpresent in analyzing strategic interactions. Though experimental evidence for real-life agents implementing such optimization is scarce, the protocol is often projected as a benchmark for what is considered as rational behavior. In this talk, I take a critical look at the assumptions behind the Nash optimization and discuss alternate possibilities for modeling benchmark rational behavior, which perhaps also make more sense in analyzing real-life game situations.

A short academic/professional biography:
Dr. V. Sasidevan received Ph.D. from Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai in 2014. Thereafter, he held post-doctoral positions at Institute of Mathematical Physics, Chennai and Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Germany. He joined Dept. of Physics, Cochin University of Science and Technology, Kerala in 2017. His research interests are Statistical physics of complex systems, Interdisciplinary applications of statistical physics in socio-economic systems, Complex networks, Systemic risk and Game theory.

A short abstract of the talk:
Do tax systems distort firm-to-firm trade? This paper considers the effect of tax policy on supplier networks in a large developing economy, the state of West Bengal in India. Using administrative panel data on firms, including transaction data for 4.8 million supplier-client pairs, we first document substantial segmentation of supply chains between firms paying Value-Added Taxes (VAT) and non-VAT-paying firms. We then develop a model of firms’ sourcing and tax decisions within supply chains to understand the mechanisms through which tax policy interacts with supply networks. The model predicts partial segmentation in equilibrium because of both supply-chain distortions (taxes affect how much firms trade with each other) and strategic complementarities in firms’ tax choices. Finally, we test the model’s predictions using variations over time within-firm and within supplier-client pairs. We find that the tax system distorts firms’ sourcing decisions, and suggestive evidence of strategic complementarities in firms’ tax choices within supplier networks.

A short academic/professional biography:
Tushar K. Nandi is an Assistant Professor of Economics at CTRPFP, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. He did his Ph. D. in Economics from University of Siena, Italy. He was Visiting Scholar at University of Oxford and Post-Doc Fellow at Universite Paris Sud. He is an Applied Econometrician and works on issues of Education, Labour Market and Taxation in developing country context. He has a number of publications in reputed journals including Journal of Development Economics. He teaches courses on Microeconometrics at graduate level. Currently, he is involved in two research projects. One looks at labour market inequality from an intergenerational perspective. Other project is on indirect taxation in India – how tax policy affects firms’ trading behavior.

A short abstract of the talk:
In India migration of labour force was low for almost four decades after independence. But as reforms changed the role of the government from manufacturer to service provider, rapid urbanization attracted people from rural to urban areas. As a result while the number of migrants in the country has increased over time, they remain limited mostly within shorter distances.
In order to understand the dynamics of internal migration in India, I will discuss different dimensions of labour migration - trends and patterns of internal migration, the characteristics of the migrants, the factors that influence internal migration etc. and its dynamics over time. I will focus on how overall dynamics of migrant-sending and migrant-receiving states are changing after reforms with respect to per capita income differences. In recent years, there is an emergence of “Southern Pull” which faded the role of bilateral barriers to migration like physical distance, physical contiguity between states, linguistic divide etc. and highlights the importance of ‘social networks’ in migration decision. I will highlight different forms of ‘social networks’, such as contacts or presence of friends, relatives etc., which act as the channel of information and help migrants to get information about job prospects, access to basic services (like education, health, and housing), information on procedures (technical and legal), financial help, administrative assistance — and also emotional solidarity.

A short academic/professional biography:
Sunetra Ghatak is a Research Fellow at National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), New Delhi. She did her Ph.D. in Economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and specialized in the area of labour, gender, trade and health-related issues. She has worked with donor agencies, development consultancies and national level think tanks. She has ten years of experience in the field of socio-economic and development research. Her strength lies in quantitative and qualitative research, systematic review, policy analysis, and field survey (tool preparation, sampling, training, survey). She has contributed several research papers on development economics in various prominent national and international journals.

A short abstract of the talk:
This talk is about the organisation of financial market place referred to as it's microstructure.  It presents how the market microstructure effects the outcomes from a financial market place -- which is the quality of prices and the liquidity with which transactions in the market are undertaken.  The talk then focusses on the benchmark that is used  to measure the quality of prices from competitive markets, which derives from the efficient market hypothesis.  The talk wraps up with some work that measures the price efficiency of the Indian equity markets.

A short academic/professional biography:
Susan Thomas holds degrees in civil engineering and economics from IIT, Bombay and University of Southern California, Los Angeles, respectively. She is faculty at the Indira Gandhi Institute for Development Research, Bombay. Her research is in financial econometrics and market microstructure in India. Her engagement with markets includes designing the stock market index (Nifty), designing and building a real-time risk management system for the clearing corporation, and the use of call auctions. She has worked on projects with the World Bank, IFC, ADB, both the securities and commodity derivatives exchanges in India, and the Government of India. More recent policy engagements include being a member of the Standing Council of the competitiveness of the Indian Financial Sector and the Bankruptcy Legislative Reforms Committee, set up by the Ministry of Finance, which submitted a draft Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code which was passed as law in May 2016.  Her work can be accessed at http://www.ifrogs.org

A short abstract of the talk:
Many social sciences have turned towards experiments as the prime method to explore causal connections, whether by exploring naturally occurring randomness or by generating it in the lab or in an online environment. Many non-experimental methodologies (such as in the statistical analysis of observational data) also have adopted the experimental way of thinking about causality as the effect of a randomly assigned “treatment” on some outcome.  While the experimental turn has undoubtedly been beneficial for the social sciences, in this paper I highlight some of its (more or less well-known) disadvantages and outline alternative theoretical and empirical research strategies. The main disadvantages are a) a reduction of theoretical complexity to mono-causal arguments; b) a loss of a holistic view on causality where multiple causal processes, some of them operating through feedback mechanisms, simultaneously affect some outcome; c) a quasi-magical fear of tainted, impure forms of causality brought about by endogeneity. I outline some ideas of how to think and research about these three elements of complexity without loosing much clarity of causal analysis and empirical rigor.

A short academic/professional biography:Andreas Wimmer's research brings a long term historical and globally comparative perspective to the questions of how states are built and nations formed, how individuals draw ethnic and racial boundaries between themselves and others, and under which conditions these processes result in conflict and war. Using new methods and data, he continues the old search for historical patterns that repeat across contexts and times. He has pursued this agenda across the disciplinary fields of sociology, political science, and social anthropology and through various styles of inquiry: ethnographic field research (in Mexico and Iraq), comparative historical analysis, quantitative research with cross-national or survey data, network studies, and formal modeling. His most recent book is “Nation Building. Why Some Countries Come Together While Others Fall Apart” (Princeton 2018).

A short abstract of the talk:
In the last two decades, Indian healthcare has shown considerable improvement in terms of infant mortality rate, life expectancy, and other widely reported indicators. However, the grassroots situation is in sharp contrast to what this might imply. The vast majority in India continues to struggle with medicinal access, availability of functional healthcare centres, and rising out of pocket healthcare expenditure. In Chhattisgarh, for example, none of the 6,000 rural healthcare centers fulfil the Indian Public Health Standards, with many not having regular water supply (~20%), electricity (~10%) or even an operation theatre (70%). It is a sad eventuality that locals have to travel far and long to meet their healthcare needs, if their time/funds allow for this luxury. This is in sharp contrast to an ~8 times increase in the state’s per capita income since 2003. The topic of my conversation will be to address some of these issues, and discuss possible solutions.

A short academic/professional biography:
Ridhima is a Research Fellow with McKinsey and is currently researching on the employment effects of automation. She was most recently working with New York University as a Research Scientist. Over there, apart from her research, she provided support to an award winning executive education program in Applied Data Science methods, targeted towards state and federal government officials. Deeply passionate about socio-economic work, she is on the board of a few NGOs working in the areas of social and economic development and volunteers her time for coordinating research and grant funding efforts for Fundamental Action & Research Foundation, an NGO working on-ground for improving the socio-economic conditions of rural India. Ridhima received her MA in Economics from Delhi School of Economics, and MS in Public Policy and Management from Carnegie Mellon University. She can be reached at ridhimasodhi@gmail.com.

A short abstract of the talk:
In this lecture, I will present the basic model of Mechanism Design. Mechanism Design is reverse engineering of Game Theory, where given a (desired) outcome, one needs to construct a game that produces that outcome in equilibrium. I will discuss some fundamental results in this area and some open research problems.

A short academic/professional biography:
I have studied Mathematics and Statistics from Indian Statistical Institute. Apart from Game Theory and Mechanism Design, I work on Percolation Theory, Random Graphs, Algebraic Graph Theory, Number Theory, and Epistemic Game Theory.

A short abstract of the talk:
Regional growth in India in the post-reform period has been uneven in two important ways. First, across regions, divergent growth has led to the formation of multiple growth-clubs moving away from each other. Second, over time, regional growth has exhibited structural breaks, leading to growth accelerations and growth slowdowns. In this paper, we combine these two aspects of uneven growth in order to investigate the relative roles of growth accelerations, growth slowdowns and initial long-run growth rates in driving Indian sub- national regions towards high or low growth clubs. Based on our results, we draw policy implications for the sequencing of growth policies in these regions. Specifically, regions in lower growth clubs have a better probability of escaping from these growth traps by focussing on simpler reforms while the regions in the higher clubs need to focus on deeper reforms in order to achieve the same result.

A short academic/professional biography:
Debajit Jha is an Assistant Professor at the Jindal School of Government and Public Policy, O. P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana. He obtained his Ph.D. in Economics from the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Before joint his current assignment Dr. Jha taught in many government institutions in West Bengal. During this time he was also served as Assistant Director of Public Instruction to the Govt. of West Bengal. Dr. Jha works in the area of growth economics. His research interest lies in the issues like inequality, polarization, club convergence, medium-run growth dynamics etc. He has contributed research papers in different prominent national and international journals.

A short abstract of the talk:
Business is a complex matter. Businesses are part of complex ecosystems crossing a variety of industries and organizations in which they make interdependent strategic decisions. There are no permanent enemies or friends in business. It is cooperation when it comes to creating a pie and competition when it comes to dividing it up. Cooperating with competitors is also rational in business. This raises a question – Is Darwin’s invisible hand better than Adam Smith’s invisible hand in understanding how businesses function? Management theorists have been attempting to unite biology and business to find an answer. In this talk, we will start with a discussion on the basic ideas of how ecosystem thinking applies to business. We will further discuss some game-theoretic tools that are widely used in the analysis of competition, cooperation, and evolution in business ecosystems, complemented with real business cases and examples.

A short academic/professional biography:
Rajeev is an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. He primarily does theoretical research in game theory. His other research interests include sharing economy and internet value chain, mainly from the perspective of operations management. His research has appeared in journals like Operations Research Letters and European Journal of Operational Research. He also writes articles in popular business magazines such as Forbes India.

A short abstract of the talk:
The digital revolution, the open data trend, and the advancements in data science provide new opportunities for disaster research that is important for design of effective social and economical strategies for disaster impact reduction. Our focus is to understand the social behavioural dynamics of disasters utilising the crowd sourced data available in online social networks like Twitter.

During the recovery and relief stage of a disaster, the relief workers try to identify the need of the affected population and the affected people try to identify the right supply for their need. We aim to understand how cooperation amongst various relief workers and aid distributors using online social network emerges and how the process can be modelled using game theory or agent based models. We also try to understand the lifecycle of the dynamic process of emerging cooperation particularly whether and how a state of equilibrium is reached and how external stimulation like rumors affect the process.

A short academic/professional biography:
Srinka Basu obtained her Ph.D. from Jadavpur University. She earned her B.Tech and M.E. degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from University of Kalyani and Jadavpur University respectively. She has worked as consultant in organisations like SAP Labs and IBM. She is currently working as an Assistant Professor at the University of Kalyani. Her research interest includes Social Network Analysis, Energy and Smart Grid Research, Game Theory, Machine Learning and Data Mining, Optimization Techniques.