Yuri Faenza: Two-sided Matching Markets, Beyond Stability

We hosted our CMU INFORMS Student Chapter Seminar on March 22 , where in each seminar we invite a speaker in related field to talk about his/her research. This time we are happy to host Professor Yuri Faenza from Columbia IEOR. Yuri works in discrete optimization, operations research, matching theory, and their applications. His research has been funded by the NSF (including an NSF Career award), the ONR, the Swiss NSF, and by a Meta Research Award.

Yuri’s title is Two-sided Matching Markets, Beyond Stability. Here is the abstract of the talk: Stability is a classical concept in two-sided matching markets, and is currently successfully employed in many domains, most notably the placement of doctors in hospitals and the assignment of students to school seats. Although very popular, the classical stability approach cannot encompass all the different features that arise in applications. In this talk, we first extensively review popular modifications of the classical concept of stability in matching theory, and well-known algebraic properties of stable matchings. We then show how the latter can be exploited and extended to investigate structural and algorithmic questions on Von Neumann-Morgenstern (vNM) stable sets of matchings. vNM stability is a classical solution concept in game theory that is however known to often have poor structural and algorithmic properties. In contrast, we show that its specialization to matching markets leads to a tractable extension of stability.

We also have one-on-one meetings where students and professors can chat with Yuri on research that they are interest in. The event is a great success and thanks again to Yuri for his great talk!