Job Description

Post-doctoral Research Associate in Algorithmic Mechanism Design
Job id: 076405
Salary: £42,405 per annum, including London Weighting Allowance
Posted: 09 October 2023
Closing date: 05 November 2023
Business unit: Natural, Mathematical & Engineering Sci
Department: Informatics.
Contact details: Bart de Keijzer. Bart.de_Keijzer@kcl.ac.uk
Location: Strand Campus
Category: Research

Job description
The Department of Informatics is looking to appoint a post-doctoral research associate in the area of algorithmic mechanism design, funded by the EPSRC project “Designing Efficient Market Mechanisms with Simplicity Requirements”, led by Dr Bart de Keijzer. The post is offered on an a fixed-term contract for 1.5 years, and has a flexible starting date, between 1 February 2024 and 1 July 2024.

The project is aimed at studying a hierarchy of mechanism design problems for market settings, with a focus on designing mechanisms that simultaneously achieve good social welfare approximation guarantees, and satisfy certain simplicity requirements. Bilateral trade among one seller and one buyer is the simplest setting in this hierarchy, where the aim will be to improve on the present lower and upper bounds on the social welfare achievable by trading under a fixed price mechanism. On the other end of the hierarchy lie combinatorial exchange markets, where many agents act as traders and have complex preferences over a set of tradeable goods, and where the main aim will be to develop conceptually simple and computationally efficient mechanisms that facilitate trade among such agents.

The design of simple and transparent mechanisms has important industrial applications, including to the access economy, and to online advertising platforms. The project will involve collaboration with Meta (in particular, with Dr Riccardo Colini-Baldeschi from Meta’s Central Applied Science Team), which has one of the largest online advertising platforms, with billions of users across the world.
An ideal candidate is highly experienced in theoretical computer science will have a strong research background in algorithmic game theory and algorithmic mechanism design or a related area. The candidate will also have (or be near-completion of) a PhD in Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related area.

Funding for the post is restricted to the first point on the salary scale but will include incremental progression in-line with probation.
For further information about the project, or any other informal enquiries, please contact Bart at Bart.de_Keijzer@kcl.ac.uk
This post will be offered on an fixed-term contract for 18 months.

This is a full-time post.

Apply link: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/076405-post-doctoral-research-associate-in-algorithmic-mechanism-design