Fair Science

On October 20-22, 2016 the Laboratory of Game Theory and Decision Making organized a School on Computational Social Choice and Fair Division. After two introductory lectures by the HSE professors Anna Bogomolnaia and Hervé Moulin, the School offered courses of three worldwide experts in the field.

Professor Clemens Puppe (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Cologne, Germany) surveyed the recent research, including his own work with Professor Klaus Nehring, on judgment aggregation, a new model of aggregation extending the reach of social choice theory to committees of experts and judges.

Professor Felix Brandt (Technical University of Munich, Germany) discussed the computational difficulty of identifying classic majoritarian voting rules, with a particular emphasis on new research proving several long standing conjectures with the help of automatic proof software.

Professor William Thomson (University of Rochester, USA) demonstrated the importance of the rationality property known as "consistency" in the design of a broad range of fair division problems.

All three topics illustrated the recent successes of the axiomatic methodology in mechanism design.

The school was attended by 40 participants, including faculty members, post-doctoral, doctoral, master and undergraduate students from Russia, including Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Petrozavodsk and Novosibirsk, and a rather large number of participants from such countries as France, United Kingdom, Poland, Latvia, Israel, Japan and Ukraine. It is important to note that some of the participants had their travel expenses covered by the Higher School of Economics.

The School brought together people who are strongly interested in the topics which are essential for the research activity of the Game Theory Laboratory in the Higher School of Economics. Leading scientists presented the key concepts of their work, which can help the participants in their future research projects. Furthermore, the School has become the basis for the future international communication and collaboration in the fields of Fair Division and Social Choice.

Once again we want to thank all the participation for coming and creating a very professional, inspiring and friendly atmosphere during the entire event.

 

Photos: Margarita Niyazova