Simon Finster

Postdoctoral fellow

CREST-ENSAE (Paris)


Member of the Inria group FairPlay


Contact me at  simon.finster 'at' ensae.fr

News


March 2024 -- We have a new working paper on equity in auctions, joint work with colleagues from Inria and CNRS


Dec 2023 -- We are organizing GAIMSS'24, a multidisciplinary summer school and conference on game theory in June 2024 in Metz/France. More information and application HERE


Sept 2023 -- Our paper Substitutes markets with budget constraints: solving for competitive and optimal prices was accepted at WINE 2023


May 2023 -- Our paper Welfare-Maximizing Pooled Testing was accepted at EC'23 !


Apr 2023 -- From August to October 2023, I will hold an Associate Fellowship at the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute (SLMath) in Berkeley, CA, in the research programme 'Mathematics and Computer Science of Market and Mechanism Design'


Nov 2022 --  I defended my PhD at Oxford and am starting a new position as a postdoc at CREST-ENSAE in Paris and the CNRS/Université Grenoble Alpes

About me


I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at CREST-ENSAE in the group FairPlay under the supervision of Patrick Loiseau and Bary PradelskiI received my PhD in Economics from the University of Oxford, Nuffield College, where I was advised by Paul Klemperer.

My research spans various topics in microeconomics, including applied/experimental and theoretical economics, game theory, and the intersection of economics and computer science.

I am enthusiastic about developing solutions for real world problems, for example mechanisms in healthcare with a focus on distributional and fairness concerns. In recent work, we developed a pooled testing mechanism for infectious diseases, whereby samples are prioritised to maximise overall expected welfare of the population of individuals. I'm also interested in fairness aspects in auctions and distributional preferences in markets more generally, with applications in finance, government licensing (e.g. spectrum, transport, or natural resources), or electricity markets.

To study these problems, I apply tools from mechanism design and optimisation, as well as experimental economics. In much of my work, I aim to apply and evaluate the mechanism and algorithms we develop either in the lab or in the field.