The ShanghaiTech Multi-Agent Systems Research Team (SMART) was started by Prof. Dengji Zhao in 2017. The team’s research is on algorithmic game theory and multi-agent systems, especially mechanism design and its applications on social networks. The team pioneered and promoted a new trend of mechanism design on social networks, namely how to incentivize the existing participants of a game to invite new participants via their social connections. This new perspective has not been studied in the traditional settings. It is very challenging in theory because the participants are competitors and they would not invite each other by default. Attracting new participants via social networks is also highly demanded in practice, which is essentially what online advertising aims for. For this research challenge, Zhao’s team have made several seminal contributions in auctions, coalitional games and matching with over 30 high-quality publications. Prof. Zhao has also contributed a Blue Sky paper at AAMAS 2021 to set up the related research agenda and offered four tutorials at AAAI 2022, AAMAS 2019 and IJCAI 2017/2018. Prof. Zhao was invited to give an Early Career Spotlight talk at IJCAI-ECAI 2022.
The team also pioneered the study of "Incentives for Early Arrival in Cooperative Games" since 2023, which is a new property proposed for online cooperative games (including cost sharing). The first results on this (Incentives for Early Arrival in Cooperative Games) has received the only Best Paper Award at AAMAS 2024. For a general introduction of this problem, please refer to the blue sky paper at AAAI 2025 (Incentives for Early Arrival).
