Algorithmics, Social choice, Market Design, and Other Topics

Congratulations to Ariel Procaccia for winning the Social Choice and Welfare Prize  2020. Ariel is the third computer scientist (after Vince Conitzer and Tim Roughgarden) to win the prestigious award highlight the increasing impact computer scientists are having on social sciences. Ariel has been instrumental in popularising fair division within the AI community and beyond. His influential papers on fair division, voting theory and mechanism design have also led to several new lines of inquiry. 

The Australian Council of Learned Academies (ACOLA) has published a report   titled that discusses the potential of AI to improve our wellbeing in Australia. The report is written by  Toby Walsh, Neil Levy, Genevieve Bell, Anthony Elliott, James Maclaurin, Iven Mareels, and Fiona Woods.

Our ACM EC 2019 paper presented by coauthor Anna Bogomolnaia.

Article at Medium.com Participatory budgeting (PB)  is a democratic paradigm in which residents in a municipality vote over which public projects to fund. Major cities such as Paris, Madrid and New York are spending hundreds of millions of dollars using PB to allocate funds. PB has also been termed  the ‘next big thing’ in Australian local government . Some PB approaches involve citizen “juries” deliberating over project funding from different angles. Other approaches involve direct voting from the residents. The most widely-used PB voting method across the globe uses direct voting and works as follows. Residents are asked to express approval for the projects they like. The method sorts the projects by number of approvals and ‘greedily’ goes down the list of projects and selects the projects if their selection does not exceed the budget limit. Thus it can be called the “greedy” method. The method is democratic because it allows all the residents to express...

Alan Turing is the new face of British 50-pound note !

The Future of Economic Design The Continuing Development of a Field as Envisioned by Its Researchers Editors: Laslier, J.-F., Moulin, H., Sanver, M.R., Zwicker, W.S. (Eds.) Collects innovative, provocative essays by researchers on the future of economic design Presents short, informal opinions and reflections on chances and challenges of a field Offers an unconventional, fresh and intuitive vision on economic design which readers will enjoy This collection of essays represents responses by over eighty scholars to an unusual request: give your high level assessment of the field of economic design, as broadly construed. Where do we come from? Where do we go from here? The book editors invited short, informal reflections expressing deeply felt but hard to demonstrate opinions, unsupported speculation, and controversial views of a kind one might not normally risk submitting for review. The contributors – both senior researchers who have shaped the field and promising, younge...