Fair Shares, Stable Prices: Algorithms for Dynamic and Digital Economies

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Abstract Allocating resources and pricing commodities are foundational problems at the intersection of economics and computer science. As economic and computational systems evolve, however, these classical problems take on new forms and pose different challenges, requiring new algorithmic and economic theory. In this talk, I will present two representative lines of work that address this shift.

1. Online Allocation: I will discuss the fair allocation of indivisible resources to sequentially arriving agents where allocations must be made irrevocably. This is a notoriously challenging problem with few positive results due to strong impossibility barriers. I will discuss two of my recent works that take steps towards overcoming these barriers using randomized algorithms and prediction-based algorithms.
2. Pricing Data and ML Models. I will then discuss equilibrium pricing in markets for data and access to ML models. Because these assets are freely replicable and non-rivalrous, classical notions of pricing and market equilibrium do not apply directly, making even the existence of stable prices unclear. I will present recent work on the existence and computation of stable equilibrium pricing in markets for data and API access to ML models.

I will conclude with a discussion of open problems and broader research agenda. 

Biography
Pooja Kulkarni is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago’s Data Science Institute. She earned her PhD from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and subsequently held a postdoctoral position at Northwestern University. She is broadly interested in theoretical computer science, discrete optimization, and economics and computation, with a focus on resource allocation and the economics of data and machine learning. Her work has appeared at leading venues including SODA, EC, ITCS, ICML, and NeurIPS. Prior to her PhD, she earned her master’s degree from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and her undergraduate degree from the College of Engineering Pune, receiving gold medals in both programs. She has also held internships at Meta, NVIDIA, and NTT Data.