Optimization and Equilibrium Seminar “Easier than we thought: Some reductions in bilevel programming”

Speaker: David Salas (UOH & CMM)

Abstract: Bilevel programming was first introduced in 1934 and gain a lot of interest in the 70’s due to its large modeling capability. The model has been heavily studied for the last 50 years and many generalizations have been introduced presenting new difficulties to overcome. Or that is what we thought. In 2020, B.Zeng showed that pessimistic bilevel programming, a variant we thought was way harder, can be reformulated as the usual optimistic one. Starting from this point, the community of bilevel programming has started to question the beliefs about harder variants. In this presentation we will discuss the seminal work of Zeng, the recent discussion about coupling constraints, reductions of Generalized Nash Equilibrium problems and finally the discussion of wether Single-Leader-Multi-Follower games represent a harder model or not with respect to bilevel programming.