Simon Finster

I am on the job market in 2024-25.

News

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

About me

I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at CREST-ENSAE in the Inria 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 theoretical and applied/experimental economics, game theory, and the intersection of economics and computer science.

I am enthusiastic about developing solutions for real world problems, with a focus on distributional and fairness concerns. In my most recent work, we find simple rules to distribute surplus more equitably in multi-unit auctions. We also developed a pooled testing mechanism for infectious diseases, whereby samples are prioritized to maximize overall expected welfare of the population of individuals. Moreover, we reconcile welfare and revenue concerns in markets of digital monopolies. In my PhD, I studied preferences over distributions of objects that guarantee anonymity of buyers, with applications in finance and public sector licensing (spectrum, transport, or energy), as well as strategic behavior in multi-object auctions.

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