Speaker: Dorje Brody
Title: From mathematical finance to mathematical politics
Abstract: Generative models for market filtration offer a highly effective way of obtaining realistic asset price dynamics to enhance risk management in financial markets. Such a construction goes beyond the immediate realm of financial modelling. In this talk I outline how a similar technique can be applied to model dynamics of electoral competitions and other democratic processes: By constructing voter filtration it is possible to generate a dynamical model that can be used to work out, for instance, likelihoods of different candidates winning a future election (which becomes analogous to pricing a digital option), as well as strategies to enhance success probabilities. I will also show that when there is more than one information source, they interact to generate the voter filtration in a nontrivial manner such that optimal communication strategies reduce to solving classical game-theoretic problems.