Looking for expertise in broad field of social sciences (Economics, Political Science, Sociology...) with a focus on Research topics where allocation is a core problem going from school allocation to migration, carbon trading...
We are at first interested by an Experimental dimension: how the goals of some allocation mechanism can be characterized and how a mechanism and its variant may be tested. Hence, overall goal is "to keep in the loop" the human dimension: from specifying to testing
Overall goal of the proposal Mechanism Design aims at defining algorithms and procedures for organising the selection of some outcome with respect to the preferences of human and artificial agents. Selecting a good outcome is at first importance as these algorithms extensively regulate society: e.g., election, household allocation or student selection; the key problem is that agents may use strategy for taking advantage of the mechanism for their own benefit
The aim of this project is to use and extend formal verification techniques used for guaranteeing the quality and robustness of computer-based systems for designing good mechanisms regardless of the strategic aspect. Main benefit is that Mechanism Design will be redefined in terms of synthesis: human designers focus on the expected properties of the mechanism and, accordingly, the machine synthesises mechanisms well defined and explainable by design. Second benefit is, by challenging the formal verification techniques with societal problems, we will address scalability, user interface issues, make them progress and usable by a large audience.