Yellow Pad Report

Today Fuhito Kojima dropped by from Stanford to give us a primer in the theory of market design for matching markets. Well, the guy is just plain scary-smart, in addition to being ebullient, unassuming, gracious, and personable. Fuhito does high-level theory, but theory with very practical applications, such as how to design algorithms that best match kids to schools, doctors to hospitals, and so forth, taking account of the preferences of people on both sides of the market, and the possibility that they may try to game the system to get a preferred match. His presentation was completely non-technical, in the sense of relying on simple examples to develop intuition rather than theorems and proofs. He humbly noted his contributions to the literature, and pointed to outstanding unsolved problems. One suspects he will solve a few of them. Nice.