Tri-Dung Nguyen, who is based on a fifty-fifty basis in the Business School and Mathematics, has just been awarded a five-year Early Career Fellowship by the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council.
Tri-Dung was initially appointed under the LANCS Initiative, which is built on research collaboration between Southampton and three other UK universities. His research is in the area of cooperative game theory. This is a branch of mathematical game theory, a field made famous by the movie A Beautiful Mind about the life and work of John Nash.
Cooperative games involve multiple players or decision-makers. The Fellowship will enable Tri-Dung to undertake breakthrough research for an important class of cooperative games, using a novel approach that allows for uncertainty and can also tackle large problems (i.e. games with many players) that cannot be solved using existing methods.
Tri-Dung plans to apply his research findings to a number of novel real-world applications. For example, he is working with the LINK network of ATM machines, to develop a fair cost sharing mechanism to banks that are LINK members as well as other ATM card service providers. This study is very timely, as the LINK network is currently at risk of breaking down and, if this happens, millions of UK customers might have to pay fees in future when using ATM machines.
