Fair Division @ the Social Choice and Welfare Meeting 2020

Message by Haris Aziz, Steven J. Brams, Jörg Rothe, William Thomson, and Bill Zwicker

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If your research interests include fair division, please read on. The five of us (Haris, Steve, Jörg, William, and Bill) are encouraging scholars from diverse research communities – computer science, economics, mathematics, political science, and other fields – to submit papers on fair division and related investigations of fairness, for presentation at the Mexico City meeting of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare in 2020 (June 24-27). Our goal is to bring together people with shared interests who may otherwise never meet, because they usually attend conferences that draw from largely disjoint groups.

SCW meetings do not have special sessions identified and organized in advance, so this effort is informal. We have, however, made the co-chairs of the Mexico City meeting aware of our plans, and their response has been very encouraging. They are particularly keen to increase the number of computer scientists attending the conference, further encouraging bonds among the “traditional” social choice and welfare research community and the COMSOC community. In this connection note that Ariel Procaccia is one of this year’s two winners of the Social Choice and Welfare Prize, and will be giving a plenary address in Mexico City. The organizers tell us that they will be quite happy to arrange one or more sessions on fair division – whatever seems appropriate in light of the number of actual submissions.

These are early days, and we will be sending a brief follow-up once the website for SCW 2020 is up and running. The site should be announced at http://www.unicaen.fr/recherche/mrsh/scw/meetings
which currently has some limited information about the conference.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to signal early interest, please don’t hesitate to do that; email zwickerw@union.edu, and use subject heading “Mexico Fair Division.” It goes without saying that COMSOC 2020 (Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, 26-29 July) also welcomes submissions in fair division and that both meetings cover a much broader variety of related topics.

Sincerely,

Haris Aziz – haris.aziz@unsw.edu.au
Steven J. Brams – sjb1@nyu.edu
Jörg Rothe – rothe@hhu.de
William Thomson – wth2@mail.rochester.edu
Bill Zwicker – zwickerw@union.edu



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