Lanchester prize to Ashlagi, Kanoria, Leshno, Braverman and Shi (post 2 of 2)

 INFORMS has now announced the details of the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize, which went to two teams, one of which worked on matching and market design.

Here is the matching team, with a little more detail than in my previous post*, about the papers that were recognized by the award.

2024 Winner(s)

• Itai Ashlagi , Stanford University
• Mark Braverman, Princeton University
• Yash Kanoria, Columbia University
• Jacob Leshno, University of Chicago
• Peng Shi, USC Marshall School of Business
  

Winning material: Collection of Papers: “Unbalanced random matching markets: The stark effect of competition” and “Clearing matching markets efficiently: informative signals and match recommendations”

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Here's the prize citation (sent to me by Sasa Pekec, the chair of the prize committee):

"The 2024 Lanchester Prize is awarded to Itai Ashlagi, Mark Braverman, Yash Kanoria, Jacob Leshno, and Peng Shi for their papers “Unbalanced random matching markets: The stark effect of competition” and “Clearing matching markets efficiently: Informative signals and match recommendations”.

These papers have advanced the field of market design by providing fundamental insights into the performance of two-sided matching markets. By introducing a novel theoretical approach, they resolve a long-standing empirical puzzle: why the set of stable matchings is small in many practically important matching markets. Moreover, by creatively integrating match recommendations and signaling strategies, they demonstrate how to reduce congestion in these markets. These contributions have profoundly impacted both methodological work and practical applications focused on the conduct and organization of centralized and decentralized markets."

The other members of the prize committee were Francis de Véricourt, Wedad Elmaghraby, Fatma Kilinç-Karzan, Azarakhsh Malekian, and Mengdi Wang

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Itai shared with me his brief remarks upon accepting the award on behalf of the team at the recent Seattle meeting:

 

"This is a real honor and it is very special to share the prize with my wonderful coauthors Mark Braverman, Yash Kanoria, Jacob Leshno and Peng Shi who could not attend this event today.  It is a great honor and humbling to share this award with  Anatoli Juditsky and Arkadi Nemirovski as well as the distinguished past recipients of the prize. 34 years ago, Alvin Roth and Marilda Sotomayor were awarded the prize for their remarkable and beautiful book on two-sided matching. The last two decades, matching in two-sided markets has been and still is a very active area in Operations Research and economics, with many successful applications and a rich theory. We are grateful to be able to contribute to this area. Thanks to Sasa and the committee. It is a real honor being part of this community."

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*Earlier: Wednesday, October 23, 2024 Lanchester Prize (Post 1 of 2)

Lanchester Prize (Post 1 of 2)

 The 2024 INFORMS meetings in Seattle this weekend was the occasion of a number of awards, including the Lanchester Prize, the big publication award in operations research and management science.  Congratulations to the two winning publication teams.

One of the teams will be familiar to the readers of this blog: Itai Ashlagi, Yash Kanoria, Jacob Leshno, Mark Braverman and Peng Shi.  They received the award for a series of papers on matching, about which I'll blog in a subsequent post.

Frederick W. Lanchester Prize

The Lanchester Prize is awarded for the best contribution to operations research and the management sciences published in English in the past five years. 

Learn more about the Lanchester Prize and how to be nominated on the INFORMS website.

WINNING TEAM ONE

Anatoli Juditsky

Université Grenoble-Alpes

Arkadi Nemirovski

Georgia Tech

WINNING TEAM TWO

Itai Ashlagi

Stanford University

Yash Kanoria

Columbia University

Jacob Leshno

Chicago University

Mark Braverman

Princeton University

Peng Shi

University of Southern California

Honorable Mention

Guillermo Gallego

The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen

Huseyin Topaloglu

Cornell University

 

 

New fellows of the Econometric Society

Congratulations to the 42 newly elected Fellows of the Econometric Society. That's up from 29 new Fellows elected in 2023, which is a step towards the goal (about which I blogged last year*) of electing more Fellows.  But elections depend on recognition that isn't equally available to every specialty and geography, so there are still many nominees and others who would be jewels in the crown of the Society.

"The Society is pleased to announce the election of 42 new Fellows of the Econometric Society. The 2024 Fellows of the Econometric Society follow.

Jerome Adda, Bocconi University 

Cristina Arellano, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (Secondary affiliation: Latin America)

Costas Arkolakis, Yale University

John Asker, University of California, Los Angeles (Secondary affiliation: Australasia)

David Atkin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Paul Beaudry, University of British Columbia

Sascha O. Becker, University of Warwick and Monash University

Sandra E. Black, Columbia University

Estelle Cantillon, Universite Libre de Bruxelles

Alessandra Casella, Columbia University

Thomas Chaney, University of Southern California

David Dorn, University of Zurich

Janice Eberly, Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management

Kfir Eliaz, Tel Aviv University

Erica Field, Duke University

Andrea Galeotti, London Business School

Francisco Gallego, Pontificia Universidad Caatolica de Chile

Maitreesh Ghatak, London School of Economics (Secondary affiliation: Asia)

Olivier Gossner, CNRS - CREST; London School of Economics

Ayşe Ökten İmrohoroğlu, University of Southern California

Henrik Kleven, Princeton University

Kala Krishna, The Pennsylvania State University

Jeanne Lafortune, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile

Francesco Lippi, LUISS University; Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance

Deborah J. Lucas, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Annamaria Lusardi, Stanford University

N. Gregory Mankiw, Harvard University

Kalina Manova, University College London

Elena Manresa, New York University

Enrique G. Mendoza, University of Pennsylvania (Secondary affiliation: Latin America)

Ismael Y. Mourifie, Washington University in St Louis (Secondary affiliation: Africa)

Barry Nalebuff, Yale School of Management

Andrew Newman, Boston University

Efe A. Ok, New York University

Guillermo Ordonez, University of Pennsylvania

Maria Petrova, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Mar Reguant, IAE-CSIC; Northwestern University

Diego Restuccia, University of Toronto

Andrés Rodríguez-Clare, University of California, Berkeley (Secondary affiliation: Latin America)

Andrea Weber, Central European University

Luigi Zingales, University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Gabriel Zucman, Paris School of Economics; University of California, Berkeley

Finally, the Society would like to express its gratitude to the members of the 2024 Fellows Nominating Committee: Jan Eeckhout (chair), Mariacristina De Nardi, Marcela Eslava, Richard Holden, Yuichi Kitamura, Yaw Nyarko, and Nathan Nunn."

 

As I wrote last year, Congratulations again to the new Fellows, who have received the carefully considered and frugally awarded applause of their peers. 

##########

*Last year:

Tuesday, October 10, 2023

Econometric Society Fellows (2023), procedures, and some thoughts on prizes in general

Golden Goose awards for woodpeckers, penguins, and artificial intelligence

 The Golden Goose awards are given each year to "recognize the tremendous human and economic benefits of federally funded research by highlighting examples of seemingly obscure studies that have led to major breakthroughs and resulted in significant societal impact."

This year they recognize three streams of work, that have led to the recovery of an endangered woodpecker species, to the more effective counting of penguins, and to the invention of neural nets on which the current artificial intelligence industry is based.

Here are those stories.

It’s a Family Affair: The Resurgence of the Red-Cockaded Woodpecker  AWARDEE: Jeff Walters

From Poop to Protection: Satellite Discoveries Help Save Antarctic Penguins and Advance Wildlife Monitoring  AWARDEES: Christian Che-Castaldo, Heather Joan Lynch, Mathew Schwaller

How We Think: Brain-Inspired Models of Human Cognition Contribute to the Foundations of Today’s Artificial Intelligence  AWARDEES: Geoffrey Hinton, James L. McClelland, David E. Rumelhart

Here's the first paragraph of the description of this third award (last but not least:)

"Decades before artificial intelligence emerged as the platform for innovation that it is today, David Rumelhart, James McClelland, and Geoffrey Hinton were exploring a new model to explain human cognition. Dissatisfied with the prevailing symbolic theory of cognition, David Rumelhart began to articulate the need for a new approach to modeling cognition in the mid-1970s, teaming up with McClelland with support from the National Science Foundation to create a model of human perception that employed a new set of foundational ideas. At around the same time, Don Norman, an early leader in the field of cognitive science, obtained funding from the Sloan Foundation to bring together an interdisciplinary group of junior scientists, including Hinton, with backgrounds in computer science, physics, and neuroscience. Rumelhart, McClelland, and Hinton led the development of the parallel distributed processing framework, also known as PDP, in the early-1980s, focusing on how networks of simple processing units, inspired by the properties of neurons in the brain, could give rise to human cognitive abilities. While many had dismissed the use of neural networks as a basis for building models of cognition in the 1960s and 1970s, the PDP group revived interest in the approach. Skeptics critiqued the new models too, and had only limited success in enabling effective artificially intelligent systems until the 2010s, when massive increases in the amount of available data and computer power enabled Hinton and others to achieve breakthroughs leading to an explosion of new technological advancements and applications."

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Prior awards included market design in 2013 and 2014.

Sigecom Test of Time Award 2024 for AdWords and generalized online matching by Mehta, Saberi, Vazirani, and Vazirani

 The SIGecom Test of Time Award recognizes the author or authors of an influential paper or series of papers published between ten and twenty-five years ago that has significantly impacted research or applications exemplifying the interplay of economics and computation. More details and nomination procedure…

The Test of Time Award Winners for 2024 are Aranyak Mehta, Amin Saberi, Umesh Vazirani, and Vijay Vazirani  

They are cited for "introducing and solving a model of online matching with budgets that has seen many practical applications to online markets and broad and continuing impact in the literature."

in their paper

AdWords and generalized online matching, Journal of the ACM 54(5), 2007, Article 22

Abstract: How does a search engine company decide what ads to display with each query so as to maximize its revenue? This turns out to be a generalization of the online bipartite matching problem. We introduce the notion of a trade-off revealing LP and use it to derive an optimal algorithm achieving a competitive ratio of 1−1/e for this problem.

From the introduction:

"Internet search engine companies, such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, have revolutionized not only the use of the Internet by individuals but also the way businesses advertise to consumers. Typical search engine queries are short and reveal a great deal of information about user preferences. This gives search engine companies a unique opportunity to display highly targeted ads to the user.

"The online advertising mechanisms used by search engines, including Google’s AdWords, are essentially large auctions where businesses place bids for individual keywords, together with limits specifying their maximum daily budget. The search engine company earns revenue when it displays their ads in response to a relevant search query (if the user actually clicks on the ad). Indeed, most of the revenues of search engine companies are derived in this manner [Battelle 2005]. One factor in their dramatic success is that, unlike conventional advertising, search engine companies are able to cater to low-budget advertisers (who occupy the fat tail of the power law distribution governing advertising budgets of companies and organizations).

"The following computational problem, which we call the adwords problem, is a formalization of a question posed to us by M. Henzinger: There are (private communication, 2004). N bidders, each with a specified daily budget bi . Q is a set of query words. Each bidder i specifies a bid ciq for query word q ∈ Q. A sequence q1q2 · · · q M of query words q j ∈ Q arrive online during the day, and each query q j must be assigned to some bidder i (for a revenue of ciq j ). The objective is to maximize the total revenue at the end of the day while respecting the daily budgets of the bidders.

"In this article, we present a deterministic algorithm achieving a competitive ratio of 1 − 1/e for this problem, under the assumption that bids are small compared to budgets."

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Last year's award:

Monday, April 3, 2023

Test of Time Award 2023 to Immorlica & Mahdian, and Ashlagi, Kanoria & Leshno

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"Past and Present Members of the Test of Time Award Committee: Yeon-Koo Che, Yiling Chen, Nikhil Devanur, Joan Feigenbaum, Jason Hartline, Bobby Kleinberg, Paul Milgrom, Noam Nisan, Asu Ozdaglar, David Parkes, David Pennock, Alvin Roth, Tim Roughgarden, Larry Samuelson, Tuomas Sandholm, Yoav Shoham, Éva Tardos, Moshe Tennenholtz"

New members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

 Each year, new members are elected to  join Benjamin Franklin in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Here is the announcement of the New Academy Members Elected in 2024

Congratulations to all!

Here are the new Economists:

Section 2 – Economics

1. Pol Antràs,  Harvard University
2. Nathaniel Hendren,  Massachusetts Institute of Technology
3. Erik Hurst,  University of Chicago Booth School of Business; University of Chicago
4. Anna Mikusheva,  Massachusetts Institute of Technology
5. Serena Ng,  Columbia University; National Bureau of Economic Research
6. Muriel Niederle,  Stanford University
7. Amir Sufi,  University of Chicago Booth School of Business; National Bureau of Economic Research

Call for nominations: Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research.

 Here's the call for the Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research. (I've finished a term and am no longer on the jury...)

THE 2024 CALL IS OPEN!

CALL FOR ENTRIES DEADLINE  APRIL 30, 2024 (10:00 pm UTC) → Submit online

The annual €500,000 Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research in cooperation with the BIH Quest Center for Responsible Research is inviting applications and nominations again. The international award is open to any researcher, or group of researchers, institution, organization, and early career researcher around the globe whose work helps to fundamentally advance the quality, transparency, and reproducibility of science and research. We warmly welcome applications and nominations from marginalized and underrepresented groups. The Award will honor successful candidates in the following three categories:  I Individual Award (€200,000): Individuals or small teams who have outstandingly contributed to fostering research quality can be nominated. Nominators are strongly encouraged to consider a diverse set of criteria, including gender, race/ethnicity, geography, and career stage. II Institutional Award (€200,000): Governmental and non-governmental organizations, institutions, or other entities that have notably enhanced research quality can apply or be nominated. Successful governmental organizations or institutions will not receive any funds in addition to the award itself. III Early Career Award (€100,000): Individuals or teams can submit a project proposal that seeks to foster research quality and value. Eligible candidates must hold a doctorate or have equivalent research experience and should not have been working as an independent researcher for more than five years. In the case of a team entry, the majority must be Early Career Researchers. The deadline for entries is April 30, 2024. The awardees will be announced by the end of 2024. → Learn more about all past winners and finalists here. Selection An international, interdisciplinary, and diverse panel of researchers and research quality activists will evaluate submissions and select awardees. Meet the jury here. For questions, please contact Einstein Foundation Award Coordinator Dr. Ulrike Pannasch.

Fairness in algorithms: Hans Sigrist Prize to Aaron Roth

 The University of Bern's Hans Sigrist Prize has been awarded to Penn computer scientist Aaron Roth, and will be celebrated today.

Here are today's symposium details and schedule:

The Hans Sigrist Symposium

Data Science: The Power of the Human Mind for the Sake of Humankind

Here's an interview:

Aaron Roth: Pioneer of fair algorithms  In December 2023, the most highly endowed prize of the University of Bern will go to the US computer scientist Aaron Roth. His research aims to incorporate social norms into algorithms and to better protect privacy.  by Ivo Schmucki 

"There are researchers who sit down and take on long-standing problems and just solve them, but I am not smart enough to do that," says Aaron Roth. "So, I have to be the other kind of researcher. I try to define a new problem that no one has worked on yet but that might be interesting."

"Aaron Roth's own modesty may stand in the way of understanding the depth of his contributions. In fact, when he authored his doctoral thesis on differential privacy about 15 years ago and then wrote on the fairness of algorithms a few years later, terms like “Artificial Intelligence” and “Machine Learning” were far from being as firmly anchored in our everyday lives as they are today. Aaron Roth was thus a pioneer, laying the foundation for a new branch of research.

"I am interested in real problems. Issues like data protection are becoming increasingly important as more and more data is generated and collected about all of us," says Aaron Roth about his research during the Hans Sigrist Foundation’s traditional interview with the prize winner. He focuses on algorithmic fairness, differential privacy, and their applications in machine learning and data analysis.

...

"It is important that more attention is paid to these topics," says Mathematics Professor Christiane Tretter, chair of this year's Hans Sigrist Prize Committee. Tretter says that many people perceive fairness and algorithms as two completely different poles, situated in different disciplines and incompatible with each other. "It is fascinating that Aaron Roth’s work shows that this is not a contradiction."

...

"The first step to improving the analysis of large data sets is to be aware of the problem: "We need to realize that data analysis can be problematic. Once we agree on this, we can consider how we can solve the problems," says Aaron Roth."

2023 EINSTEIN FOUNDATION AWARD FOR PROMOTING QUALITY IN RESEARCH

 Here's the press release from the Einstein Foundation in Berlin:

THE WINNERS OF THE 2023 EINSTEIN FOUNDATION AWARD FOR PROMOTING QUALITY IN RESEARCH

"THE EINSTEIN FOUNDATION BERLIN IS TO HONOR BELGIAN BIOINFORMATICIAN YVES MOREAU, THE BERKELEY INITIATIVE FOR TRANSPARENCY IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, AND THE RESPONSIBLE RESEARCH ASSESSMENT INITIATIVE WITH THIS YEAR’S EINSTEIN FOUNDATION AWARD FOR PROMOTING QUALITY IN RESEARCH 2023. 

The recipient of the Individual Award is Yves Moreau from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Moreau ranks among the most ardent advocates for ethical standards in the utilization of human DNA data in the age of artificial intelligence and big data. He designs algorithms that protect personal privacy during the analysis of genetic data. This year’s Institutional Award recognizes the work of the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS), which advocates for rigor, transparency, and reproducibility in social scientific research. The Institute achieves this through establishing open science practices, developing appropriate infrastructure, and conducting meta-research. The 2023 Early Career Award goes to the Responsible Research Assessment Initiative headed by Anne Gärtner (Dresden University of Technology). The project aims to identify, test, and establish novel criteria for the assessment of researchers and their output. Moving away from quantity of output and other unsuitable metrics, it will foreground quality of research by taking into account factors such as transparency, robustness, innovation, and cooperation. 

...

"Jury member Michel Cosnard, computer scientist at the Université Nice-Sophia-Antipolis, believes that Yves Moreau is highly deserving of the award, which recognizes his unwavering dedication on both professional and ethical fronts. “Moreau links deep research in DNA analysis and artificial intelligence with ethics, integrity, and human rights. His work and achievements serve as a cornerstone to help us confront the difficult social questions that arise from rapid technological developments.” 

"Fellow jury member and Stanford University economist Alvin Roth firmly endorses the chosen winner of the Institutional Award: “The Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences plays an active, creative role in the ‘credibility revolution’ in science by promoting careful experimentation, and supporting efforts to make replication and verification commonplace.” 

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The two previous awards

Monday, December 5, 2022

The 2022 Einstein Foundation Awards

Thursday, November 25, 2021

Promoting Quality in Research: the inaugural Einstein Foundation Awards, 2021

This was my final year on the prize jury.

Ariel Pakes celebrated at the Nemmers Prize conference

 Ariel Pakes could certainly also win the prize for being loved by his students and colleagues: 

CONFERENCE IN HONOR OF ARIEL PAKES

Computer science award

A computer scientist whose work I follow has won an award that reflects on both his teachers and students.

Aaron Roth receives 2023 CyLab Distinguished Alumni Award 

"Aaron Roth, the Henry Salvatori Professor of Computer Science and Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania, has been named CyLab's 2023 Distinguished Alumni Award winner.

...

"Roth earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2010, where he was advised by former CMU Professor Avrim Blum. His dissertation, 'New Algorithms for Preserving Differential Privacy,' gave new methods for performing computations on private data.

"Nominated by his former advisee, now Assistant Professor in CMU's School of Computer Science, Steven Wu, the award recognizes Roth's excellence in algorithms and machine learning, leadership in the field, and commitment to his students.

"As my advisor, Aaron is nothing less than a beacon of inspiration, marked by his relentless curiosity, exceptional instinct for identifying the most exciting questions, creative problem-solving acumen, and impeccable eloquence in communication," said Wu.

"Advising is one of the best parts of my job," said Roth. "Being recognized by one of my former students at the University where I earned my Ph.D. is really special."

Ehud Kalai, interviewed on the past and future of game theory

Here's a half-hour video interview of Ehud Kalai, by Sandeep Baliga, that touches on the history of game theory at Northwestern and elsewhere, his work on axiomatic models of bargaining, Econ-CS (and the Kalai Prize), and more.

 

The 2023 Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research is now soliciting nominations

The Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research is now soliciting nominations for the 2023 award.

→ Nominations and Applications
→ Jury
→ Recipients
→ Award Presentation
→ Booklet
→ FAQs

Calendar and deadlines

April 30, 2023 – Deadline for Applications
Fall 2023 – Final Selection

Test of Time Award: call for nominations

 Test of Time Award

"The SIGecom Test of Time Award recognizes the author or authors of an influential paper or series of papers published between ten and twenty-five years ago that has significantly impacted research or applications exemplifying the interplay of economics and computation.

...

"The 2023 SIGecom Test of Time Award will be given for papers published no earlier than 1998 and no later than 2013. Nominations are due by February 28th, 2023 

...

"The 2022 Test of Time Award Committee: Alvin Roth, Stanford University; Moshe Tennenholtz, The Technion; Noam Nisan (chair), The Hebrew University of Jerusalem"

The 2022 Einstein Foundation Awards

 Here are the Recipients of the 2022 Einstein Foundation Awards

Einstein Foundation Individual Award Winner 2022:

Gordon Guyatt, for his seminal contributions to evidence based medicine (including the name)

"Einstein Foundation Award winner Gordon Guyatt improved the quality of clinical research and helped bring evidence to medicine. His next mission is bringing patients into the discussion"

Einstein Foundation Institutional Award 2022:

The Psychological Science Accelerator

"The Psychological Science Accelerator, winner of the 2022 Institutional Award, has made its name by facilitating large, crowdsourced international studies in all aspects of the discipline and by democratizing and diversifying big team psychological science."

Einstein Foundation Early Career Award 2022:

Ape Research Index (the name almost speaks for itself)

Here's the description of the Award(s): The Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research

"The Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research aims to provide recognition and publicity for outstanding efforts that enhance the rigor, reliability, robustness, and transparency of research in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, and stimulate awareness and activities fostering research quality among scientists, institutions, funders, and politicians. To acknowledge the outstanding role early career researchers (ECRs) have in promoting research quality, ECRs will be invited to propose projects that foster research quality and value. Projects will be competitively selected for funding and internationally showcased."

Here are the members of this year's award jury. (I am one of the 15 jury members).

Here's my post on last year's prizes:

Thursday, November 25, 2021

Promoting Quality in Research: the inaugural Einstein Foundation Awards, 2021

Hervé Moulin is celebrated in Paris

 I'm in Paris to speak tomorrow at a ceremony and conference in honor of Hervé Moulin.  

A focus of the talks will be Moulin's work on fairness, and my talk (on controversial markets) will focus in part on how concern for possible unfairness of market outcomes may lead to attempts to ban certain markets.

Here's the announcement of the Friday session:

Cérémonie de clôture de la chaire d’excellence internationale Blaise Bascal [Closing ceremony of the Blaise Bascal Chair of International Excellence]

Vendredi 4 novembre 2022, amphithéâtre Liard en Sorbonne – 14 h à 19 h 30 17 rue de la Sorbonne

Programme

13 h 30 – 14 h : Accueil du public au 17, rue de la Sorbonne – 75005 Paris 

14 h – 14 h 05 : Ouverture de la cérémonie de clôture de la Chaire d’excellence internationale Blaise Bascal par Christine Neau-Leduc, présidente de l’université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne 

14 h 05 – 14 h 10 : Remerciements de Hervé Moulin, professeur à l’université de Glasgow 

14 h 10 – 15 h : Can we define Fairness? par Hervé Moulin 

15 h – 15 h 45 :  Repugnant Transactions and Controversial Markets par Alvin Roth 

15 h 45 – 16 h 45 : Pause  

16 h 15 –  17 h :  Democracy and the Pursuit of Randomness par Ariel Procaccia 

17 h – 17 h 45 : Fair Social Choice par Marc Fleurbaey 

17 h 45 – 17 h 55 : Discours de clôture par : 

Un représentant de la Région Ile-de-France 

Michel Grabisch, professeur à l’université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne 

Agnieszka Rusinowska, professeur à l’université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne 

*********

The following day (Saturday) will be a conference on 

Recent Advances in Fair Division November 5th, 2022, Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, Centre Panthéon, Salle 1

8:45-9:00 Welcome to participantso

9:00-9:45 :Haris Aziz, Best of Both Worlds Fairness

9:45-10:30 :Edith Elkind, Mind the Gap: Fair Division with Separation Constraints

10:30-11:00 Coffee 

11:30-12:15 :Juan D Moreno Ternero, The Costs and Benefits of multilingualism

12:15-13:00 :Jean-Jacques Herings, An Axiomatization of the Pairwise Netting Proportional Rule in Financial Networks

13:00-14:00 Lunch

14:00-14:45 :Dominik Peters, Voting in Participatory Budgeting

14:45-15:30 :Rupert Freeman, )A New Fairness Criterion for Assignment Mechanisms

15:30-16:00 Coffee break

16:00-16:45 :Utku Unver, Balancing Affirmative Action with Other Societal Interests:  a generalized theory on India’s reservation system

16:45-17:30 :Jean-Francois Laslier, Universalization and Altruism

2022 Exeter Prize to Sandro Ambuehl, Douglas Bernheim, and Axel Ockenfels

 Here's an announcement in an email from the Economic Science Association (ESA):

"We are happy to announce the winners of the 2022 Exeter Prize for the best paper published in the previous calendar year in a peer-reviewed journal in the fields of Experimental Economics, Behavioural Economics and Decision Theory.

The winners are Sandro Ambuehl (University of Zurich), Douglas Bernheim (Stanford University), and Axel Ockenfels (University of Cologne) for their paper “What motivates paternalism? An experimental study”, published in The American Economic Review. 

There is a growing interest in how “choice architects” design choices for others.  This paper provides new insights about how and why people in the role of a choice architect limit the decisions of others.  Ambuehl, Bernheim and Ockenfels use the tools of experimental economics to study how subjects help other subjects (“choosers”) to be more patient in tempting intertemporal choices (in which a small, immediate outcome is pitted against a large, delayed outcome).  A key result is that choice architects do act to restrict the choice set of choosers to help them avoid temptation.  A key strength the paper is offering insight into the motivations behind this decision.  The paper proposes and tests two possible motivations:  1) A “mistakes-projective paternalism” in which the choice architect assumes others share his/her susceptibilities to temptations and uses choice sets to minimize temptations and 2) an “ideals-projective paternalism” in which the choice architect assumes others follow his/her values and limit the choice set to those valued outcomes.  The results provide clear evidence for the latter motivation.  The paper provides evidence about additional beliefs and motivations.  Choice architects believe that they are improving the welfare of choosers and they underestimate how many people they are affecting with their restrictions.  Finally, the behavior of choice architects in the laboratory predicts support for real-world paternalistic policies (regarding, for example, taxes on alcohol and tobacco) and the motivation to make choices harder is consistent with “ideals-projective paternalism.”

The winning paper was selected by the panel of Rick Larrick (Duke University), Muriel Niederle (Stanford University), and Tomasz Strzalecki (Harvard University)."

 

TTS2022 Awards--Congratulations

 Today at TTS2022, prizes will be awarded.  One that I know is very well deserved, is to Dr. Vivek Kute, for his extraordinary achievements in kidney transplantation in India. Congratulations to all the prize winners.

I've followed Dr. Kute's work over the years in multiple posts.

Ariel Pakes wins the Nemmers Prize

 Here's the announcement of the Nemmers Prize, from Northwestern University:

Northwestern announces 2022 Nemmers Prize winners. Biennial prizes recognize top scholars for outstanding achievements

"Northwestern University has announced the winners of the 2022 Nemmers Prizes in Earth sciences, economics and mathematics. The biennial prizes recognize top scholars for their lasting significance, outstanding achievements, contributions to knowledge and the development of significant new modes of analysis.

"This year’s recipients are Emily Brodsky for Earth sciences, Ariel Pakes for economics and Bhargav Bhatt for mathematics. Each will receive $200,000 and will interact with Northwestern faculty and students through lectures, conferences or seminars.

...

Ariel Pakes received the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics, honored for his “fundamental contributions to the development of the field of empirical industrial organization as it is applied to the study of market power, prices, mergers and productivity.” He is the Thomas Professor of Economics at Harvard University.

"In his research, Pakes develops methods for empirically analyzing market responses to environmental and policy changes. He and his collaborators have developed ways to estimate and analyze consumer demand patterns that underlie pricing and product placement incentives, the production functions that underlie the analysis of firm productivity and the investment decisions that underlie the evolution of markets over time.

"Pakes and collaborators have demonstrated the usefulness of these tools by analyzing deregulation in the telecommunication industry, demand and product placement decisions in the auto industry, the impact of incentives on doctors’ hospital allocations and consumers’ choices of health insurance plans, the evolution of bidding strategies in a new electric utility market and the development of improved consumer price indices. Subsequently, these tools have become a mainstay of market interactions in much of economics and are often employed by consultancies and regulatory agencies to analyze the likely outcomes of regulatory decisions. They have also been used for internal firm planning. 

"Pakes is a member of the Econometric Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He has received the Frisch Medal of the Econometric Society, the Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize for research that integrates theory with empirical analysis and the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics, Finance and Management. Pakes is a laureate of the Web of Science and an honoree of the American Antitrust Institute for Outstanding Antitrust Achievement in Economics. He also is a distinguished fellow of both the Industrial Organization Society and of the American Economic Association. Pakes is a founding member of Microeconomic Insights, a home for summaries of microeconomic research that informs the public about societally relevant microeconomic issues."

Mark Braverman wins Abacus Medal (formerly Nevanlinna Prize)

 Mark Braverman, a computer scientist whose work touches on mechanism design, has won the Abacus Medal of the International Mathematical Union.

Here are some links: citation, video, write-up, CV/publications, proceedings, interview, Plus magazine! article

Readers of this blog may be interested in these papers:

Optimization-friendly generic mechanisms without money

Mark Braverman

"The goal of this paper is to develop a generic framework for converting modern optimization algorithms into mechanisms where inputs come from self-interested agents. We focus on aggregating preferences from n players in a context without money. Special cases of this setting include voting, allocation of items by lottery, and matching. Our key technical contribution is a new meta-algorithm we call \apex (Adaptive Pricing Equalizing Externalities). The framework is sufficiently general to be combined with any optimization algorithm that is based on local search. We outline an agenda for studying the algorithm's properties and its applications. As a special case of applying the framework to the problem of one-sided assignment with lotteries, we obtain a strengthening of the 1979 result by Hylland and Zeckhauser on allocation via a competitive equilibrium from equal incomes (CEEI). The [HZ79] result posits that there is a (fractional) allocation and a set of item prices such that the allocation is a competitive equilibrium given prices. We further show that there is always a reweighing of the players' utility values such that running unit-demand VCG with reweighed utilities leads to a HZ-equilibrium prices. Interestingly, not all HZ competitive equilibria come from VCG prices. As part of our proof, we re-prove the [HZ79] result using only Brouwer's fixed point theorem (and not the more general Kakutani's theorem). This may be of independent interest."

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Clearing Matching Markets Efficiently: Informative Signals and Match Recommendations by Itai Ashlagi , Mark Braverman, Yash Kanoria , Peng Shi , Management Science, 2020, 66(5), pp.2163-2193.  https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2018.3265

Abstract: "We study how to reduce congestion in two-sided matching markets with private preferences. We measure congestion by the number of bits of information that agents must (i) learn about their own preferences, and (ii) communicate with others before obtaining their final match. Previous results suggest that a high level of congestion is inevitable under arbitrary preferences before the market can clear with a stable matching. We show that when the unobservable component of agent preferences satisfies certain natural assumptions, it is possible to recommend potential matches and encourage informative signals such that the market reaches a stable matching with a low level of congestion. Moreover, under our proposed approach, agents have negligible incentive to leave the marketplace or to look beyond the set of recommended partners. The intuitive idea is to only recommend partners with whom there is a nonnegligible chance that the agent will both like them and be liked by them. The recommendations are based on both the observable component of preferences and signals sent by agents on the other side that indicate interest."

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Update: from Quanta.

The Scientist Who Developed a New Way to Understand Communication. Mark Braverman has spent his career translating thorny problems into the language of information complexity.  by Stephen Ornes

"While Braverman continues to guide the theory as his former students and postdocs push it forward, the bulk of his work is done. Now his interests are more focused on a new field called mechanism design, which uses the mathematical approaches of economics and game theory. "