Algorithmics, Social choice, Market Design, and Other Topics

At SAGT, I had the opportunity to listen to Rakesh Vohra's lectures based on his book on mechanism design . The following are his videos of some previous lectures on the same topic.

I couldn't help smile when I read the following passage from a short note in GEB . It shows how not being extra careful about the terms one uses can lead to massive confusion down the road. A possible cause of Echenique’s oversight might be the confusing state of the terminology regarding SUB and IIA (not to mention Arrovian IIA in social choice, which is a different concept). As pointed out by Echenique, the substitutability property is also Sen’s condition α (Sen, 1969) and the so-called Chernoff’s condition. But it has also been called axiom C3 in Arrow (1959), the Heritage property H in Aizerman and Aleskerov (1995) or in Moulin (1985), and the Heredity property in Aleskerov and Monjardet (2002) or in Aleskerov et al. (2007). On the other hand, IIA is Postulate 5 in Chernoff (1954), Axiom 2 in Fishburn (1975), the strong superset’s axiom in Bordes (1979) and the Outcast Property O in Aizerman and Aleskerov (1995) or in Aleskerov (1999). Moreover, IIA was introduced in fam...

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...