Two of the biggest success stories in the application of game theory - allocating students to schools and auctioning spectrum licenses - are based on the same fundamental principles, as Professor of Quantitative Microeconomics Jean-Jacques Herings will show in his inaugural address on Friday, June 23, 2023. He will connect competition and cooperation to cases where both lead to the same, favorable outcomes.
Jean-Jacques Herings ’ work shows that school choice problems and assignment problems such as those concerning spectrum licenses can both be regarded as specific cases of a general model he has developed. He has designed a procedure that generalizes both the deferred acceptance algorithm, which can help resolve school choice problems, and the simultaneous multi-round auction, which is used to deal with assignment problems. Both methods are used separately in practice.
Matching problems
In his address, titled Competition and Cooperation, Herings will elaborate on these two types of matching problems in detail (see text box below).
Fundamental principles
Herings shows that both school choice problems and assignment problems can be regarded as specific cases of a general model he has developed. He has also designed a procedure that generalizes both the deferred acceptance algorithm and the simultaneous multi-round auction. And he shows that procedures for dealing with both allocation problems and choice-of-school problems can be based on a competitive market mechanism.
Inaugural lecture
Professor Jean-Jacques Herings will deliver his inaugural address in the Tilburg University Auditorium on Friday, June 23, 2023, at 16:15 hrs. The address is titled Competition and Cooperation and will be livestreamed.
Read more about Herings’ work in this interview: "You can optimize pretty much everything with mathematics"