Algorithmics, Social choice, Market Design, and Other Topics

Congratulations to Vince Conitzer and Tim Roughgarden for winning the biennial Social Choice and Welfare Prize . They are the first computer scientists to win the award. Previous winners include illustrious names like Tayfun Sonmez and Matthew Jackson.

The Handbook on Market Design edited by Nir Vulkan, Alvin E. Roth, and Zvika Neeman is about to be published by Cambridge University Press. The book has major sections on matching markets and auctions. Alvin E. Roth, Nir Vulkan, and Zvika Neeman: Introduction Part I: General Principles 1: Alvin E. Roth: What Have We Learned From Market Design? 2: Gary Bolton: Not Up To Standard: Stress Testing Market Designs for Misbehavior 3: Paul Klemperer: Using and Abusing Auction Theory Part II: Cases Section II.A: Matching Markets 4: Tayfun Sönmez and Utku Unver: Market Design for Kidney Exchange 5: Atila Abdulkadiroglu: School Choice 6: Aytek Erdil and Haluk Ergin: Improving Efficiency in School Choice 7: Sarbartha Bandyopadhyay, Fedor Iskhakov, Terence Johnson, Soohyung Lee, David McArthur, John Rust, Joel Watson, and John Watson: Can the Job Market for Economists be Improved? 8: Joshua Gans and Scott Stern: Designing Markets for Ideas 9: Ashok Rai and Tomas Sjöström: Rede...

The latest edition of CACM has an i nteresting article by Ariel Procaccia on the problem of cutting a cake. The problem captures settings where a heterogeneous divisible goods needs to be divided among agents in fair and optimal manner. The article is a a gentle yet up to date overview of the past and recent work on the problem.

AAMAS 2013 : Twelfth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems St Paul 6-10 May 2013 http://aamas2013.cs.umn.edu/ AAMAS was located in St. Paul, USA this year. Toby (Walsh) and I were the two participants from NICTA. The first two days were dedicated to co-located workshops and tutorials. Along with Edith Elkind (NTU Singapore) and Michael Wooldridge (Oxford), I co-organized the fourth edition the International workshop on cooperative aspects of multiagent systems ( CoopMAS ). We had four sessions of interesting talks including an invited talk by Thomasz Michalak in which he discussed the applications of cooperative game theory to gauge the centrality of nodes in a network. On the second day, I attended a number of talks from the workshop of OptMAS (Optimization in Multiagent Systems). The main conference started on the 8th. Among the invited speakers, Barbara J. Grosz (Harvard) and Cristiano Castelfranchi (Inst. of Cognitive Sciences and Technol...