April 04, 2025, Webb Hall 1100

Terms like inducement, incentivization, persuasion, and to some extent enticement, are used in our daily lives to describe situations where one individual (decision maker, or entity) acts in a way to influence the decision-making process of another individual or individuals, where the outcome could benefit all involved or only the one who has initiated the process. Such influence could be exerted in two different ways (though variations do exist): via a direct input by the influencer into the utility or reward (or loss) of the receiving party, or by controlling (and possibly crafting) the information flow to the latter toward shaping beliefs at the receiving end (as in spread of disinformation). Both scenarios (and those that fall in between) could be analyzed within a dynamic Stackelberg game-theoretic framework with a precise notion of equilibrium, which this talk will address. The focus will naturally be on soft inducement (incentivization, persuasion) policies, rather than hard enforcement (such as threat) ones which are not that interesting (at least mathematically) or practical. The talk will introduce some explicit models that lead to appealing such policies and discuss a diverse set of mathematical machinery used to derive them. The talk will also include discussions on the impact of various factors, such as population size, placement of intermediaries, uncertainty in modeling, and disparate probabilistic outlooks by the decision makers, on the resulting equilibria, and identify several challenges that lie ahead.

Tamer Başar has received B.S.E.E. from Robert College, Istanbul, and M.S., M.Phil, and Ph.D. degrees in engineering and applied science from Yale University. After stints at Harvard University, Marmara Research Institute (Gebze, Turkey), and Boğaziçi University (Istanbul), he joined the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1981, where he is currently Swanlund Endowed Chair Emeritus; CAS Professor Emeritus of ECE; and Research Professor, CSL and ITI. At Illinois, he has served as Director of the Center for Advanced Study (2014-2020), Interim Dean of Engineering (2018), and Interim Director of the Beckman Institute (2008-2010). He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and Fellow of IEEE, IFAC, SIAM, and AAAI. He has served as President of the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS), Founding President of the International Society of Dynamic Games (ISDG), and President of the American Automatic Control Council (AACC). He has received several awards and recognitions over the years, including the IEEE CSS Bode Lecture Prize (2004), IFAC’s Quazza Medal (2005), AACC’s Bellman Control Heritage Award (2006), ISDG’s Isaacs Award (2010), the IEEE Control Systems Technical Field Award (2014), Medal of Science of Turkey (1993), IEEE Millennium Medal (2000), and Wilbur Cross Medal from his alma mater Yale University (2021). He has also received honorary doctorates and professorships from a number of international institutions, including KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm); Tsinghua, Shandong, and Northeastern Universities (China); Boğaziçi and Doğuş Universities (Istanbul); and NAS of Azerbaijan. He was Editor-in-Chief of the IFAC Journal Automatica between 2004 and 2014, and is currently editor of several book series. He has contributed profusely to the fields of systems, control, communications, optimization, networks, and dynamic games, and has current research interests in stochastic teams, games, and networks (with finite- and infinite-population models); multi-agent systems and learning; data-driven distributed optimization; epidemics modeling and control over networks; design of incentive mechanisms; strategic information transmission, spread of disinformation, and deception; security and trust; energy systems; and cyber-physical systems.