Algorithmics, Social choice, Market Design, and Other Topics

A fully funded PhD position is available with Haris Aziz ( https://research.unsw.edu.au/people/dr-haris-aziz ) at UNSW Sydney.  The successful applicant will work on the project “Mechanism Design for Fair Transport Systems.” The goal of the project will be to incentivise cooperative and efficient and fair utilisation of transport facilities. The student will work closely with the joint supervisors Haris Aziz (Computer Science, UNSW) and Vinayak Dixit (Civil Engineering, UNSW). They will have David Parkes (Harvard University) as an international co-supervisor.  We are looking for candidates with a strong interest in interdisciplinary research at the intersection of computer science, engineering and economics. Relevant areas include economics and computation, algorithmic market design, and computational social choice. In view of the relevant areas, applicants must have a strong background in algorithms and discrete mathematics. Fluency in written and spoken English is ...

We consider a multi-agent resource allocation setting that models the assignment of papers to reviewers. A recurring issue in allocation problems is the compatibility of welfare/efficiency and fairness. Given an oracle to find a welfare-achieving allocation, we embed such an oracle into a flexible algorithm called the Constrained Round Robin (CRR) algorithm, that achieves the required welfare level. Our algorithm also allows the system designer to lower the welfare requirements in order to achieve a higher degree of fairness. If the welfare requirement is lowered enough, a strengthening of envy-freeness up to one item is guaranteed. Hence, our algorithm can be viewed as a  computationally efficient way to interpolate between welfare and approximate envy-freeness in  allocation problems. Link:  http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~haziz/RB.pdf Authors: H. Aziz, X. Huang, N. Mattei and E. Segal-Halevi.