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2nd Workshop on Mechanism Design for Social Good - MD4SG '18

June 22, 2018 at Cornell in Ithaca, NY

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The second workshop on Mechanism Design for Social Good (MD4SG ‘18) will be held in conjunction with the 19th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC ‘18) at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY on June 22, 2018. It will feature invited speakers, contributed presentations, and domain-specific discussions among academic experts, field experts, and researchers from the EconCS community.

Synopsis: The EC community has made great contributions both to the development of theoretical foundations and applications of algorithms, optimization, and mechanism design. Key application domains have so far included ad auctions and electronic commerce, cloud computing, fair division, kidney donation, and school choice. In this workshop, we will focus on a set of promising directions that deal with improving access to opportunity including bias and discrimination, online labor markets, and economic inequality. Each of these domains is concerned with how the government and citizens design allocation policies, impose tax structures, create laws, and regulate activities. These problems have the unifying property that progress has the potential to significantly improve societal welfare by improving individuals’ access to opportunity.

The workshop will have three main components:

  • Keynote talks from domain experts in fields such as economics, information science, and public policy,
  • Domain-specific discussion between a diverse group of experts about where techniques from the EC community can be helpful, and
  • Presentations of submitted papers by members of the EC community.

The goal of this workshop is fourfold:

  1. Expose the EC community to new research directions through invited talks,
  2. Engage the workshop attendees with domain experts to foster future learning and collaboration opportunities,
  3. Jointly brainstorm and formalize research problems that the community can work on, and
  4. Highlight existing work in the community that falls under this theme.

More generally, we see this workshop as part of a broader goal to create and raise interest in different algorithmic and mechanism design problems with a social good objective.

Sponsors: The second Workshop on Mechanism Design for Social Good is generously supported by the Schmidt Family Foundation, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, and EC.

Organizers: Rediet Abebe and Kira Goldner
Contact: organizers@md4sg.com