HEC Montréal is pleased to announce the recent creation of a Chair in Game Theory and Management and the appointment of its first holder, Professor Georges Zaccour, Full Professor of Marketing and an internationally renowned researcher.
Professor Zaccour was elected a member of the Royal Society of Canada in 2003, and is well known for his conceptual and applied work in dynamic game theory in many fields, including marketing, environmental and energy management, and operational research. His most fundamental theoretical contributions have dealt with dynamic individual rationality, the design of sustainable co-operative mechanisms among economic and social agents and the development of a new concept of a dynamic Nash equilibrium that allows players to adapt their strategies to random events.
“Game theory,” he explains, “looks at problems of competition and co-operation among agents (players). They may be businesses, countries, automatons, military aircraft, etc. The characteristic of dynamic games is the presence of a system (e.g. market share or concentration of pollution) that evolves over time in response to players’ actions and, in some cases, random events (economic crises, unexpected drop in oil prices, etc.). Game theory is now part of the curriculum of many disciplines such as applied mathematics, economics, political science and biology, and of the MBA programs of major American and European universities. At HEC Montréal, a PhD-level course in game theory has been offered for over 10 years.”
Scientific research and activities
The holder of the new Chair plans to publish research findings in scientific journals and share them at congresses and symposiums, but also wants to add a large number of scientific activities. He is already planning to organize an annual scientific symposium, a series of ten seminars and a major conference. Professor Zaccour also wants to involve as many graduate and postgraduate students as possible in different research projects.
The Chair’s research initiatives will look at theoretical and algorithmic developments in game theory and their applications to management issues. These applications, mainly in marketing and in energy and environment, include:
- Conflicts and co-operation in marketing distribution networks
- Determining marketing strategies in oligopolistic markets
- Sharing environmental costs
- Co-ordinating environmental strategies in an international context
- Co-ordinating supply chains and the marketing-production interface
- E-commerce and, in particular, its implications for relationships in traditional distribution networks.
From 2002 to 2006, Professor Zaccour was President of the International Society of Dynamic Games, founded in Finland in 1990, which brings together some 300 researchers from all over the world. He has been a professor at HEC Montréal since 1986, and among other senior positions has served as Director of the Group for Research on Decision Analysis (GERAD), a major interuniversity centre, Director of the PhD program and Director of the Department of Marketing. In addition, he has overseen the pedagogical aspects of many training programs in the energy sector.
Professor Zaccour holds a PhD (Administration) from HEC Montréal, and has published over 80 articles in scientific journals and edited 13 books. With Steffen Jørgensen, he is the author of Differential Games in Marketing (Springer, 2004). He is Associate Editor of International Game Theory Review, Environmental Modeling and Assessment, Computational Management Science and the Journal of Operations & Logistics.
