Match-making: From efficient network markets to stable marriages

Prof. Rahul Jain
USC

Wednesday, April 29, 2009 at 2:00pm
Engr IV Room 57-124

Abstract
We will first consider the problem of matching buyers (e.g., of network services) to sellers. We focus on the design problem: Namely, how to design an economics-informed exchange system that aligns incentives of the various buyers and sellers for optimal (network) system operation. The designed market system is robust to strategic manipulation by the players, i.e., it has zero price of anarchy in the full information case, and asymptotically zero price of anarchy in the incomplete information case. We will then consider a variation of the Gale-Shapley stable marriage problem where matched players are strategic and exchange bilateral payments. The formulation is motivated by an online advertisement exchange problem.

Biography
Rahul Jain is an Assistant Professor in the EE & ISE departments at the University of Southern California. Prior to USC, he was in the Math Sciences division of the IBM T J Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY. He got his B.Tech in EE from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and an MA in Statistics and a PhD in EECS from the University of California, Berkeley. His current research interests lie in network optimization and control, and in particular, network economics and games, and stochastic control.