Algorithmics, Social choice, Market Design, and Other Topics

Yesterday, a dear friend and brilliant ex-colleague --- Markus Brill --- successfully defended his PhD.  Markus was in my research group throughout my stay in Munich and it has been a pleasure working with him. Markus' thesis was on the "Set-Valued Solution Concepts in Social Choice and Game Theory". The thesis spans a range of topics from the computation of set-valued games-theoretic solution concepts such as Shapley's saddles to examining strategic aspects of social choice correspondences especially those based on pairwise majority graphs. The research is focused both on the axiomatic and algorithmic aspects of solution concepts. Markus' doktorvater is Felix Brandt who has had an evident influence on Markus' research interests. The external examiner was Jérôme Lang . Congratulations Markus!

After the t riumph of Shapley and Roth , microeconomics is in the news again. The Economist has profiled some well-known micro-economists who although academics by training have been working for companies such as Microsoft, Google, eBay, influencing how the markets work. The list includes Preston McAfee , Steve Tadelis , Susan Athey , and Hal Varian .

Harvard postdoc and ADT NICTA 's virtual group member Lirong Xia's work has been profiled in a press-release issued by the Harvard School of Science and Engineering.  (Hat tip to Toby Walsh).

Interesting workshops in the 'neighborhood' of Australia :-) http://www2.ims.nus.edu.sg/Programs/013game/index.php#Activitie s

http://researchinprogress.tumblr.com Hat tip to Markus Brill :-)

Breaking news and massive boost for matching theory: Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley win the Nobel prize for economics for `for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design'. See The Guardian's coverage of the news.  This is also a good time to honour the contributions of David Gale ----the late colleague of Shapley who also made fundamental contributions to the growing work on matching markets.                                                                 Some of the influential publications which have helped Lloyd Shapley and Alvin Roth achieve the prize are not restricted to but at least include the following ones: Gale, D., L. S. Shapley (1962). College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage. American Mathematical Monthly 69 9-15: The paper which formalized the famous Deferred Accept...

In a recent talk, Al Roth discusses graph theoretic approaches to solve the life-and-death problem of kidney exchange. The talk is quite long but gives a detailed overview of the kind of research problems which emerge in the domain of kidney exchange.