Algorithmics, Social choice, Market Design, and Other Topics

In 1964, Isaac Asimov made some surprisingly accurate predictions about 2014: http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/23/lifetimes/asi-v-fair.html [Hat tip to Toby Walsh for pointing out the article!]

Richard Cornes and José A. Rodrigues-Neto have penned down an article on "Is Policy Too Important to be Left to Empiricists? Lessons of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics" . The article surveys the contribution of Roth and Shapley. I reproduce the conclusions verbatim from the article. The last point mentions domains where matching markets can be useful in Australia. First, it could be dangerous to dismiss basic research as necessarily less important because of its lack of obvious immediate impact on pressing problems of the day. Second, some of the most applicable and useful ideas often come along first in the most abstract forms. They require time to mature and to prove their true value; in this case a few decades. This does not fit with the politics of the democratic electoral cycle. Third, the power of abstract mathematical ideas should never be underestimated. Looking to social sciences or policy studies through the lens of what seems to be of im...

I came across an interesting and impressive research group called Center for Engineering Social and Economic Institutions (ESEI), Zurich . The center's goal is to devise "new mechanisms for auctions, trading, matching, voting, social learning and networking".

At NICTA Optimization's annual retreat, Toby Walsh gave an entertaining talk on advancing one's research career. At a number of points, references to Hamming's advice on research was given. Here's Hamming's famous lecture.

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.