Speaker: Martin Bichler (Technical University of Munich)
Title: Designing markets with complex constraints
Abstract: Dr. Bichler will consider the general problem of pricing in markets with complex constraints. Such constraints are present in most of nowadays markets including the ones for electricity, for transportation, and for spectrum licenses. The talk will cover several papers. First, the design of a real-world market for the reallocation of fishery access rights is used to motivate several problems in the computation of market prices. Then, a new paper in which prices are computed in the presence of budget constraints is discussed. Budget constraints are an important concern in many of these markets, but they have not been considered in competitive equilibrium theory. While the allocation and pricing problem in most real-world markets is already NP-hard with payoff-maximizing bidders, it is even higher in the polynomial hierarchy if buyers are financially constrained. The talk outlines mathematical models and algorithms to compute core-stable prices, as well as computational results. Overall, the presentation sheds light on the many connections between computation and economics that become apparent in the design of marketplaces.
Bio: Martin Bichler received his MSc degree from the Technical University of Vienna, and his Ph. D. as well as his Habilitation from the Vienna University of Economics and Business. He was working as a research fellow at UC Berkeley, and as research staff member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York. Since 2003 he is full Professor at the Department of Computer Science of the Technical University of Munich (TUM), and a faculty member at the TUM School of Management. Martin received the EURO Excellence in Practice Award, the INFORMS Daniel H. Wagner prize (runner-up), and several other awards. In 2020 Martin war ranked in the top 0.5% out of 3346 scholars in the management sciences in Europe (5-year ranking) by the Wirtschaftswoche magazine. Martin is currently president of the INFORMS Section on Auctions and Market Design, the Associate Dean at the Department of Computer Science of the TUM, and Advisory Board member of the TUM Institute for Advanced Study.
