Itai Ashlagi: "Unbalanced Matching Markets"

Date: 

Monday, September 15, 2014, 11:30am to 1:00pm

Location: 

Maxwell Dworkin 119

CRCS Lunch Seminar

Speaker: Itai Ashlagi, Assistant Professor of Operations Management, MIT Sloan School of Management

Title: Unbalanced Matching Markets

Abstract:
Itai Ashlagi will discuss his paper, "Unbalanced Random Matching Markets: The Stark Effect of Competition." This piece studies competition in matching markets with random heterogeneous preferences by considering markets with an unequal number of agents on either side. First, Ashlagi will provide a tight description of stable outcomes, showing that matching markets are extremely competitive. Each agent on the short side of the market is matched to one of his top preferences and each agent on the long side does almost no better than being matched to a random partner. Second, Ashlagi will show that even the slightest imbalance leads to competition that yields an essentially unique stable matching. Results suggest that any matching market is likely to have a small core, explaining why empirically small cores are ubiquitous.

Bio:
Itai Ashlagi is an Assistant Professor of Operations Management at the Sloan School of Management.

He is interested in game theory, mechanism design, and market design. In particular he is interested in both developing and applying economic and optimization  tools for designing better marketplaces. He assisted in establishing and improving several kidney exchange programs over the world. Ashlagi is the recipient of the outstanding paper award in the ACM conference of Electronic Commerce 2009 and a Franz Edelman Laureate. Before joining MIT he spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Business School and he received his PhD in Operations Research from Technion, Israel.