Date/Time
Date(s) - 05/11/2025
11:30 am - 12:30 pm

Vikram Manjunath, Professor from University of Ottawa will present to our graduate students and faculty in KTH 334!

Vikram is a micro theorist with research interests in resource allocation, mechanism design, social choice and matching theory. Vikram will present, “Unambiguous Efficiency of Random Allocations“.

Abstract 

When allocating indivisible objects via lottery, planners often use ordinal mechanisms, which elicit agents’ rankings of objects rather than their full preferences over lotteries. In such an ordinal informational environment, planners cannot differentiate between utility profiles that induce the same ranking of objects. We propose the criterion of unambiguous efficiency: regardless of how each agent extends their preferences over objects to lotteries, the allocation is Pareto efficient with respect to the extended preferences. We compare this with the predominant efficiency criterion used for ordinal mechanisms. As an application to mechanism design, we characterize all efficient and strategy-proof mechanisms satisfying certain regularity conditions.