SIMON FINSTER

I am a postdoctoral fellow at CREST (ENSAE and Institut Polytechnique de Paris) in the Inria group FairPlay, hosted by Patrick Loiseau and Bary Pradelski. I received my PhD from the University of Oxford, Nuffield College, where I was advised by Paul Klemperer.

My research is on auctions and market design, industrial organization and experimental economics. Most recently, I study how auction design affects equity concerns between bidders.

In the fall term 2023, I was an Associate Fellow at the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute (SLMath) in Berkeley.

I enjoy bringing market design to the lab and field and develop solutions for real-world problems, focusing on fairness concerns. For indivisible goods markets, I have developed a framework with preferences over how goods should be distributed between buyers. We also devised pooled testing mechanisms for infectious diseases, in populations with heterogeneous social welfare weights. Moreover, we reconcile welfare and revenue concerns in markets of digital monopolies, and I study strategic behavior in multi-object auctions.

On the academic job market in 2024-25.

JMP, CV

News

November 2024  --  I'll be presenting at the Economic Theory Workshop at Oxford, at CEPS at ENS-Saclay in Paris, the Virtual Market Design Seminar, the Junior Workshop on Mathematical Game Theory at Luiss University, and the Séminaire parisien de Théorie des Jeux,

June 2024  --  We were fortunate to welcome 44 students and 17 speakers at GAIMSS'24, deeply indebted to our distinguished professors Nicolas Vieille (HEC Paris),  Roberto Cominetti (UAI Chile) and Panayotis Mertikopoulos (CNRS Grenoble)

June 2024  --  This summer you can meet me in Nashville (NASMES), Metz (GAIMSS), Budapest (CMID), Rotterdam (ESEM), Amsterdam (EARIE), and Oxford (MATCH-UP)

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 program '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