ACM has awarded Constantinos Daskalakis the 2008 Doctoral Dissertation Award for advancing the understanding of behavior in complex networks of interacting individuals, such as those created by the Internet. Daskalakis’s dissertation, “The Complexity of Nash Equilibria,” provides a novel, algorithmic perspective on Game Theory and the Nash equilibrium. Daskalakis, a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research New England, was nominated by the University of California, Berkeley, and will receive the award at the annual ACM Awards Banquet on June 27 in San Diego. Daskalakis’s dissertation explores whether rational, self-interested individuals can arrive, through their interactions, at a state in which no single one of them would be better off switching strategies unless others switched as well. This state is called a Nash equilibrium, and is traditionally used in Game Theory as a way of predicting the behavior of people in conflict situations. Daskalakis demonstrated that in complex systems the Nash equilibrium is computationally unachievable in some cases, suggesting the Nash equilibrium may not be an accurate prediction of behavior in all situations and emphasizing the need for new, computationally meaningful methods for modeling strategic behavior in complex systems, such as those found in financial markets, online systems, and social networks.

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