Simon Finster
Postdoctoral fellow
CREST-ENSAE (Paris) and Université Grenoble Alpes
Member of the INRIA group FairPlay
Contact me at simon.finster 'at' ensae.fr
News
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 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 Pradelski. I 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.