Algorithmics, Social choice, Market Design, and Other Topics

The Economist has started an interesting series on the field's seminal papers . The first article features  George Akerlof ’s 1970 paper, “The Market for Lemons” which is a foundation stone of information economics.

Our research has been covered in Inside Science . Thank you to Andrew Silver for reaching out to us and communicating some of the ideas in a simple manner!

Congratulations to Chun Ye for successfully defending his PhD thesis today at Columbia University. Chun has been based  at the Industrial Engineering & Operations Research Department at Columbia University. He was being supervised by Prof. Jay Sethuraman . The thesis of Chun was on "On the Trade-offs between Modeling Power and Algorithmic Complexity." The thesis includes substantial and interesting results on the assignment problem, facility location, incremental knapsack, and assortment optimization. 

UNSW now has its very own centre of market design: AGORA--- Center for Institutional, Market & Organisational Design . The name Agora means market or meeting place in Greek! The centre will be holding its first mini workshop with talks by John Ledyard (Caltech) and Rakesh Vohra (University of Pennsylvania) tomorrow.

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...