Last month, I was assigned my researcher supervisor. He had a well defined research problem in the area of Contract Theory and based on our preliminary discussions I decided to work on that. My General Test Committee (GTC) has been constituted and my zeroth GTC meeting will be on June 14, 2012, in which I would have to defend my research proposal on relational contracts. So I had already started reading research papers in this area. Meanwhile I attended a talk on cooperative game theory, given by none other than my research supervisor. He introduced the topic nicely and also discussed few research problems. After the talk, I went to his office and straight away told him that I want to work in the area of cooperative game theory and not on relational contracts. Initially he was not convinced because changing a research problem is not a good idea, but later he agreed. So I was once again back to square one. Before defining the new problem, I had to first study the basic concepts of game theory and so my research journey started with the self study of following reading resources:
- [Book] Multiagent Systems: Algorithmic, Game Theoretic and Logical Foundations by Yoav Shoham and Kevin Leyton Brown.
- [Book] A Course in Game Theory by Osborne and Rubinstein.
- [Book] Real Mathematical Analysis by Charles Chapman Pugh.
- [Lecture Notes] Cooperative Games by Stephane Airiau, ILLC-University of Amsterdam
I had been reading some research papers also by Laszlo Koczy, Lucas and Thrall, Myerson, etc., but I found it difficult to comprehend. Finally with the help of my research supervisor, I defined my new research problem which is about developing a solution concept for the stability of cooperative games with externalities.