Category Archives: nyc

computer science, economics, microsoft, nyc, research

Algorithmic economics postdoc position at Microsoft Research, NYC

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We are beginning to search for a postdoc in Algorithmic Economics at Microsoft Research, health New York City with a start date in Summer/Fall 2016. Strong graduating students should apply by December 8, 2015. Faculty: please encourage your best students to apply. Please feel free to forward and distribute the announcement as you see fit.

Research in the Algorithmic Economics group at MSR-NYC spans a wide variety of topics at the interface of economics and computation. Application areas include auctions, crowdsourcing, gaming, information aggregation, machine learning in markets, market interfaces, market makers, monetization, online advertising, optimization, polling, prediction engines, preference elicitation, scoring rules, and social media.

More information:

computer science, economics, microsoft, nyc, people, publication, research

Microsoft Researchers co-authored 21% of papers at the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation

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Twenty-six researchers from Microsoft Research labs in Boston, China, India, Israel, New York City, Redmond, Silicon Valley, and the United Kingdom co-authored a remarkable seventeen of the eighty papers published in the 2014 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC’14).

Moshe Babaioff served as General Chair for the conference and many other Microsoft Researchers served roles including (senior) PC members, workshop organizers, and tutorial speakers.

For research at the intersection of economics and computation, IMHO there’s no stronger “department” in the world than MSR.

Sébastien Lahaie and Jennifer Wortman Vaughan co-authored three papers each. Remarkably, Jenn accomplished that feat and gave birth!

The full list of authors are: Shipra Agrawal, Moshe Babaioff, Yoram Bachrach, Wei Chen, Sofia Ceppi, Nikhil R. Devanur, Fernando Diaz, Hu Fu, Rafael Frongillo, Daniel Goldstein, Nicole Immorlica, Ian Kash, Peter Key, Sébastien Lahaie, Tie-Yan Liu, Brendan Lucier, Yishay Mansour, Preston McAfee, Noam Nisan, David M. Pennock, Tao Qin, Justin Rao, Aleksandrs Slivkins, Siddharth Suri, Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, and Duncan Watts.

The full list of papers are:

Optimal Auctions for Correlated Bidders with Sampling
Hu Fu, Nima Haghpanah, Jason Hartline and Robert Kleinberg

Generalized Second Price Auction with Probabilistic Broad Match
Wei Chen, Di He, Tie-Yan Liu, Tao Qin, Yixin Tao and Liwei Wang

Optimising Trade‐offs Among Stakeholders in Ad Auctions
Yoram Bachrach, Sofia Ceppi, Ian Kash, Peter Key and David Kurokaw

Neutrality and Geometry of Mean Voting
Sébastien Lahaie and Nisarg Shah

Adaptive Contract Design for Crowdsourcing Markets: Bandit Algorithms for Repeated Principal‐Agent Problems
Chien-Ju Ho, Aleksandrs Slivkins and Jennifer Wortman Vaughan

Removing Arbitrage from Wagering Mechanisms
Yiling Chen, Nikhil R. Devanur, David M. Pennock and Jennifer Wortman Vaughan

Information Aggregation in Exponential Family Markets
Jacob Abernethy, Sindhu Kutty, Sébastien Lahaie and Rahul Sami

A General Volume‐ Parameterized Market Making Framework
Jacob Abernethy, Rafael Frongillo, Xiaolong Li and Jennifer Wortman Vaughan

Reasoning about Optimal Stable Matchings under Partial Information
Baharak Rastegari, Anne Condon, Nicole Immorlica, Robert Irving and Kevin Leyton-Brown

The Wisdom of Smaller, Smarter Crowds
Daniel Goldstein, Preston McAfee and Siddharth Suri

Incentivized Optimal Advert Assignment via Utility Decomposition
Frank Kelly, Peter Key and Neil Walton

Whole Page Optimization: How Page Elements Interact with the Position Auction
Pavel Metrikov, Fernando Diaz, Sébastien Lahaie and Justin Rao

Local Computation Mechanism Design
Shai Vardi, Avinatan Hassidim and Yishay Mansour

On the Efficiency of the Walrasian Mechanism
Moshe Babaioff, Brendan Lucier, Noam Nisan and Renato Paes Leme

Long‐run Learning in Games of Cooperation
Winter Mason, Siddharth Suri and Duncan Watts

Contract Complexity
Moshe Babaioff and Eyal Winter

Bandits with concave rewards and convex knapsacks
Shipra Agrawal and Nikhil R. Devanur

computer science, economics, events, nyc, people, prediction markets, research

Prediction Market PowWow at Yahoo! Research New York, August 2011

I am incredibly lucky. Last August, I spent three days straight thinking almost exclusively about one topic: prediction markets, mostly algorithms. Even better, I was in great company: eleven incredible visitors from across the country took time out of their busy schedules to join me at Yahoo! Research NYC in an impromptu “prediction market powwow”: Yiling Chen, Sanmay Das, Lance Fortnow, Nicolas Lambert, Abe Othman, Mike Ruberry, Rahul Sami, Florian Teschner, Jenn Wortman Vaughn, Christof Weinhardt, and Lirong Xia. (Plus fellow Yahoos Miro Dudik, Sebastien Lahaie, and David Rothschild.) It’s amazing to have a job that allows this kind of time for research and blue-sky thinking: thanks Yahoo!. It’s humbling to have such stellar colleagues to work with: thanks everyone who came. It’s also wonderful to see “the kids” (former interns and postdocs) doing so well: Rahul now has tenure at U Michigan, Yiling is a professor at Harvard, Jenn is a professor at UCLA, and Nicolas is a professor at Stanford. (Lirong: You’re next!)

Here are our notes and here is a photo:

Prediction Market Powwow Yahoo! Research Aug 2011

computer science, economics, events, nyc, prediction markets, research

Two upcoming NYC-area CS-econ events: AMMA & NYCE Day

  1. The Second Conference on Auctions, health more about Market Mechanisms and Their Applications (AMMA) is next Monday and Tuesday August 22-23, generic view 2011, web at CUNY in midtown manhattan. The program, including contributed talks on school choice, prediction markets, advertising, and market design, and invited talks by market designer extraordinaire Peter Cramton and private company stock exchange SecondMarket (where millionaires buy Facebook), look to be excellent. Hope to see you there!
  2. The fourth annual New York Computer Science and Economics Day (NYCE Day) is Friday, September 16, 2011, at NYU. You have until next Friday August 26 to submit a short talk or poster. The goal of the meeting is to bring together researchers in the larger New York metropolitan area (read: DC-Boston-Chicago) with interests in computer science, economics, marketing, and business, and a common focus in understanding and developing the economics of Internet activity.