Algorithmics, Social choice, Market Design, and Other Topics

Our latest research on envy-free cake cutting was covered in the media . The problem can be stated very simply: "Divide a cake in a way so that everyone things they got the best piece and the number of cuts is not arbitrarily many." However the problem is challenging and solution is involved. The folks at Sydney Morning Herald wanted to capture the nature and history of the problem so they made a video to explain things. Thank you Marcus Strom and Jack Fischer! The tricks to cutting cake fairly from Jack Fisher on Vimeo .

Cake cutting is a playful metaphor for an abstract mathematical setting which models fair division and conflict resolution. The setting concerns agents having different valuations over subsets of a single divisible resource (the cake). In cake parlance, it could be that someone prefers the icing and someone else prefers the cherry. It is assumed the cake is infinitely divisible and agents' valuation of the union of two disjoint cake pieces is simply the sum of the valuations of the pieces. Due to its fundamental nature, the field of cake cutting has been explored by mathematicians, computer scientists, economists, and political scientists for decades. The most central problem in cake cutting is to query the agents about their valuations of sub-intervals and use these answers to efficiently identify an envy-free allocation in which no agent prefers another agent's allocation. The solution to this problem has long been known for the case of two agents in the shape of the Div...

http://esam2016-sydney.blogspot.com.au WELCOME The Economics Discipline Group and the Centre for Policy and Market Design (CPMD) at the University of Technology Sydney  look forward to welcoming you to the 2016 Australasia Meeting of the Econometric Society. The meeting takes place from the 5th to the 8th of July. The meeting is preceded by the first edition of the Sargan Lectures on Econometrics, which will take place on the 4th and 5th of July, delivered by Professor Peter C. B. Phillips from Yale University. PLENARY TALKS Sargan Lectures: Peter Phillips (Yale) A. W. Phillips Lecture: Robert Porter (Northwestern) Colin Clark Lecture: Tom Palfrey (Caltech) E. L. Hannan Lecture: Victor Chernozukhov (MIT) Jacob Marshak Lecture: Yeon-Koo Che (Columbia) IMPORTANT DATES 15 January Submissions opening date 15 April Submissions closing date 1 May Notice of decision results 15 June Early Registration deadline 4-5 July Sargan Lecture 5-8 July ESAM...

Lloyd Shapley passed away on 12th March, 2016. It is said that one can gauge the contributions of a person by the estimate of his/her peers. When the seminal paper of  Gale and Shapley (1962) paper was reprinted in 2013, Ehud Kalai wrote a foreword for Shapley . Here's an excerpt: "More than a half a century later, the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to Lloyd Shapley and Alvin Roth. Roth opened his Nobel Prize lecture with the following sentence: “Lloyd, when I began studying game theory your work touched every part of it and shaped it, and you were an inspiration not just for me but for the whole generation of game theorists that followed you . . . .” Robert Aumann, the 2005 Nobel Laureate game theorist who often introduced Shapley as the “ High Priest of Game Theory ,” stated in his Nobel Prize Lecture that Lloyd Shapley is the “ greatest game theorist of all times .”... My personal tribute to Shapley was writing with Bart Keijzer a paper called ...

Steven Brams discusses the famous Brams-Taylor cake-cutting protocol as well as simpler protocols.

Book Review by Haris Aziz of The Nature of Computation by Cristopher Moore and Stephan Mertens Oxford University Press, 2011 985 pages, Hardcover The Nature of Computation (TNoC) is a comprehensive, accessible, and highly enjoyable book that conveys the key intellectual contributions of the theory of computing. The project took off as an effort to present theoretical computer science to physicists but it is as suitable for any science graduate who is curious to explore beautiful and deep ideas related to the mathematical structure of problems. Moore and Mertens explain the essence of the book as follows: “It is a question about the mathematical structures of problems, and how these struc- tures help us solve problems or frustrate our attempts to do so. This leads us, in turn, to questions about the nature of mathematical proof, and even of intelligence and cre- ativity.” TNoC not just provides a window so that people from other disciplines can get glimpses of the int...