Editorial from the New Co-Editors-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation
Paul W. Goldberg, M. Utku Ünver · ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation · 2023
Let us start by thanking the many people in the Algorithmic Game Theory (AGT) community, and especially the Associate Editors, for their contributions to the success of ACM TEAC since it began just over 10 years ago.It looks like business is booming in the AGT world.The number of submissions to our flagship conference ACM Economics and Computation (ACM-EC) has more than doubled over the past 5 years (from 270 in 2018 to 622 in 2023, in a sequence of steady increases).On a smaller scale, the number of submissions to the 2023 WINE conference was 225, nearly double the previous year.There are various explanations for this growth of the field.One of them is the wealth of economics models whose computational properties have not yet been properly studied, along with new interest in these computational issues in the Economics community.Besides that, there is surely a certain amount of spillover from the growth of AI in recent years, one aspect of which is "the intelligent agent" as a fundamental object of study, and the issues of understanding their interactions and the outcomes of interactions amongst multiple agents.At the same time, theoretical questions of enduring interest never go away, and even when solved they lead to interesting follow-up work.For example, following the recent proof of the Nisan-Ronen conjecture, there remains the very natural question of whether it holds for randomized mechanisms.(Indeed, multiple versions of that question exist: We might ask about mechanisms that are universally truthful, truthful in expectation, or fractional.)The field has also benefitted from the interest shown by companies such as Google, Meta, and Microsoft.Unsurprisingly, there is an increasing diversity of subtopics within Algorithmic Game Theory; the list of suggested topics at ACM-EC, WINE, and other conferences continues to grow.For example, blockchain-based systems are leading to new papers, and this subfield is just starting up.Computational finance has led to the ACM Conference on AI in Finance (ICAIF), begun in 2020, whose remit looks like it has connections to TEAC.The issues of fairness and accountability (addressed by the ACM FAccT conference and others) will surely connect increasingly to some topics in AGT over the coming years.Access and Equity are emphasized as an important focus with the newer and growing ACM EAAMO Conference.This all looks promising for ACM TEAC, the one journal that is targeted at the CS and Economics interface!We might note a caveat: that the journal's interests risk becoming diffuse.Any scholarly journal is a brand: The journal in which a paper is published creates expectations on the part of the reader, about the sort of paper it is.(Sometimes the paper's title gives the game away, but in general the identity of the journal complements the message of the title.)Should we worry that AGT is an