Friday, November 1, 2024

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)

2024 Winner(s)

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 VĂ©ricourt, 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)

Thursday, October 31, 2024

Job market for Economics Ph.D.s: 2024 versus the past 5 years

 Here's a scary story for Halloween: the job market for new Econ PhDs is off to a somewhat slow start: in the figures below, see the bright blue line of positions for 2024 to date.  There's still room to grow (as indeed we've seen in previous years).  And we're way ahead of 2020, the deep Covid year.

To: Members of the American Economic Association
From: AEA Committee on the Job MarketJohn Cawley (chair), Elisabeth “Bitsy” Perlman, Al Roth, Peter Rousseau, Wendy Stock, and Stephen Wu
Date: October 30, 2024
Re: JOE job openings by sector, 2024 versus the past 5 years

"This memo reports the cumulative number of unique job openings on Job Openings for Economists (JOE), by sector and week, compared to the same week in recent years."