Satoshi Fukuda, a Scholar of Game Theory in Milan

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF DECISION SCIENCES, FUKUDA GRADUATED IN TOKYO AND OBTAINED HIS PHD IN BERKELEY

Satoshi Fukuda was an undergraduate student in Tokyo when he read Agreeing to Disagree by Robert Aumann, the long white bearded Israeli mathematician who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2005. “It is the first paper in Economics that explicitly models the notion of common knowledge: if some fact is commonly known then not only everybody knows it, but also everybody knows that everybody knows that… everybody knows it”, he says. Since then Fukuda, now an Assistant Professor at Bocconi's Department of Decision Sciences, has been fascinated by the idea of mathematically modeling players’ knowledge and beliefs in strategic situations.
 
After the Bachelor’s degree and the MSc of Policy Studies at Chuo University in Tokyo, Fukuda enrolled for a PhD in Economics at the University of California at Berkeley. “I didn’t have a definite image of what would be like to study in an Economics PhD program in the US. But, vaguely, I was thinking that I wanted to be in an international environment, surrounded and inspired by bright and brilliant colleagues and professors”.
 
In Berkeley, he started two research paths. The first one is about epistemic game theory. He is currently working on a general framework capable of capturing players’ knowledge about their knowledge and on how to represent players’ knowledge when they are not perfectly logical reasoners or they are not necessarily introspective about their own knowledge. The second strand of research is about mechanism design theory. “In this field, I have been working on designing and studying the properties of an efficient collective decision-making problem in which each agent’s preferred joint action is privately informed and in which they cannot make monetary transfers in a dynamic setting”.
 
When he was in Berkeley, Fukuda enjoyed all forms of collaboration with his colleagues. “I believe that different perspectives put together through collaboration can produce innovative ideas”, he says. So he is eager to work together with new colleagues and students in Milan. “This is a new exciting journey for me, professionally and personally. Bocconi is an outstanding place for research in economic and decision theory. I am also excited about Milan, one of the most international cities in Europe”.

by Claudio Todesco