Dr. Arkadii Slinko from the University of Auckland (New Zealand) was invited by the IME Graduate School on October 30th. In his presentation he pointed out strategic opportunities of voters under proportional representation and the implications for designing an election system.

On October 25th the new season of IME sport events was opened with a soccer match at the JakoArena. Several sport events are planned throughout the semester, including basketball, soccer and volleyball.

On Octber 18th-19th the students and professors met in their 7th colloquium to present and discuss their latest results in research. The colloquium took place in Malsch this time.

Prof. Xiaotie Deng from City University of Hong Kong gave lectures for the IME Graduate School memebers on Complexity and Markets. The lecture series include several talks, concerning topics on "Dynamics of Strategic Manipulation in Ad-Word Auction", "Settling the complexity of Nash equilibria" and "Computational complexity issues of foreign exchange arbitrage" respectively.

Sildes (for IME members only)

The IME Graduate School organized an one-day visit to the IBM Development Center in Böblingen. The visitors consisted of IME members and colleagues from IME-related institutes as well. Several interesting talks are given concerning ongoing research in IBM such as Cell Computing, Dynamic Warehousing, RFID technology etc. The visiting group also visited the computing center at IBM Böblingen.

Dr. Rustam Vahidov gave a talk on "Representing Information System Artifacts for Design Researchers" to the IME members. Dr. Vahidov is an associate professor from John Melson School of Business, Concordia University.

The Center for Applied Law (ZAR)/Prof. Dr. Jürgen Kühling, LL.M. and the IME Graduate School held an interdisciplinary workshop on 6 February 2007 on "Advancement of Innovation under Competition". Over 30 researchers from many universities and research institutes joined the workshop. The workshop firstly addressed the interdependency of competition and innovation from a legal and economic perspective. The subsequent talks concerned the optimisation of rules governing innovation in the field of competition law, state aid law, intellectual property law as well as institutional law.

Following a successful serie of colloqiums, the 6th IME colloquium was held in Bad Herrenalb again on the first two days of Feburary, 2007. We had sessions with plenary discussion, group discussions as well as single talks between professors and students. Besides interactive discussions at daytime, we organized Bowling as the night event, in which all professors as students took part and enjoyed.

Ph.D students, their professors and mentors celebrate together for the Christmas. The party was self-organized by students with international food. On the party this year's "Best Paper Award" was also announced. The committee of the graduate school granted this award to Christiane Barz.

Prof. Anna Gunnthorsdottir from Sydney, Australia gave a talk about "Segregated meritocracies - the effects of likemindedness". Afterwards a small coffee break is held for further discussions.

This time the IME colloquium took place in the beautiful Alsace area in France. During the two-day colloquium, we had sessions with plenary discussion, group discussions as well as single talks between professors and students.

The first GDN Doctoral Consortium provided an opportunity for doctoral students to present and discuss their research projects within an interdisciplinary environment under the guidance of a panel of distinguished research faculty. It aimed at establishing a community of student researchers and at providing feedback on the participants' current research as well as guidance on future research directions. The consortium was organized by the IME Graduate School.

We welcome Nicolas Gauß as a new Ph.D student of our graduate school. His research interest is the relation of competition law to dynamic markets. In particular he focuses on the question, if markets that are characterised by innovation have to be regulated by competition law to safeguard future innovation, or if it is better for the advancement of innovation not to interfere in such markets and protect existing innovation.

The IME Colloquium takes place again in Bad Herrenalb. As an event by the end of every semester, this time the colloquium has provided great oppotunities for IME students, mentors and professors to discuss their latest research progresses.

Prof. Hal R. Varian gave a talk to IME members on the topic of "Google Auctions". Afterwards, in a poster session, the IME members presented their latest research results and started a lively discussion with Prof. Varian.

On Wednesday, February 1, 2006, the School of Economics and Business Engineering awarded a honorary doctoral degree to Professor Hal R. Varian, University of California at Berkeley.
Program More pictures

For three days more than 100 speakers (including keynote speakers Prof. Richard Roll and Prof. Darrell Duffie) discussed a broad spectrum of finance topics in parallel sessions. In the poster sessions, we presented a selection of recent research work, including credit risk management, emission trading, internalisation in securities, simulation of financial market, ontology driven market etc.

Prof. Dr. Marcin Paprzycki and Prof. Dr. Maria Ganzha gave a talk on "Introduction to Software Agents and E-commerce Agent Systems" in our IME circle lecture. After the talk a coffee reception a was held and the students had a lively discussion on the issues of the lecture with Prof. Paprzycki and Ganzha.

The Market Engineering Day brought together researchers and practitioners for talks and discussions on "Markets and Energy". The workshop includes talks in disciplines of economic sciences, computer science and jurisprudence. There was also a reception afterwards.

Prof. Dr. Martin Bichler, Technische Universit?t München, gave an invited talk within the circle lecture of the IME Graduate School this week. After an introduction by Prof. Geyer-Schulz, Prof. Bichler introduced us to Combinatorial Auctions. A coffee reception with lively discussions ended our meeting with Prof. Bichler.

Dr. Felix Brandt, junior research group leader in the Computer Science Department of the University of Munich (LMU), comes to IME Graduate School today and gives a talk on "How to aggregate preferences without revealing them". After the talk, a coffee-reception with lively discussions was held.