I am a Research Scientist at Google in Zürich, Switzerland and a Visiting Professor in the Department of Mathematics at London School of Economics. I work on problems at the intersection of Algorithms, Game Theory, and Mechanism Design.

I received my PhD in Computer Science from EPFL Lausanne. My PhD advisor was Monika Henzinger. During my PhD I did summer internships with David C. Parkes at Harvard University and Radu Jurca at Google Zürich. After my PhD I was a Postdoctoral Researcher with Tim Roughgarden at Stanford University and Éva Tardos at Cornell University, an LSE Fellow in Mathematics at London School of Economics, and a Senior Researcher at ETH Zürich.

I have acted as reviewer for Computer Science, Economics, and OR journals such as SICOMP, Econometrica, Operations Research, Mathematics of Operations Research, Management Science, and Games and Economic Behavior. I have been on the program committee of Computer Science conferences such as the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation. I was awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship, and a SNF Postdoctoral Fellowship. I am alumnus of both the German and the Swiss Academic Foundation. I have won the ACM SIGecom Best Full Paper Award at EC’19, and the ACM SIGecom Best Paper Award at EC’12.

News

• I will give a talk in the Israel AGT Seminar on our recent FOCS’20 paper about prophet inequalities and posted-price mechanisms for subadditive combinatorial auctions. The talk is on April 20, 2:30pm Israel time. You can join via Zoom!
• I joined the newly established Zurich Center for Market Design as an affiliate.
• I will give a keynote talk to the ATHENA organization at Google Research on our recent work on contract theory. The talk is scheduled for 9am PST on Dec 16, 2020, and available to Googlers only.
• I will be giving a Keynote at SAGT’20 on “Contract Theory: A New Frontier for AGT”. The other keynote speakers are Ruta Mehta and Dirk Bergemann.
• I am excited to announce that I joined Google Research in Zürich, Switzerland in August 2020.
• Our paper “Optimal Auctions through Deep Learning” was invited to appear as a Research Highlight in the Communications of the ACM.
• Our paper “Prophet Inequalities for I.I.D. Random Variables from an Unknown Distribution” received the ACM SIGecom Best Full Paper Award at EC’19.
• I am looking forward to a sabbatical as Visiting Faculty at Google Research in Zürich, Switzerland from August 2019 to July 2020.
• Together with Inbal Talgam-Cohen, I have organized an EC’19 Tutorial on “Contract Theory: A new Frontier for AGT”. Video of Part 1 and Part 2.
• I passed major review in March 2019, and will be an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics at LSE from August 2019 onwards.
• I have been granted a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant on “Contract Theory through the Algorithmic Lens”, March 7, 2019.
• I will give an Invited talk at the 5th Google Market Algorithms Workshop on our deep learning for auctions work in Mountain View, CA, USA on Feb 22, 2019.
• I am one of the winners of the 2017/18 LSE Excellence in Education Awards.

Some recent conference papers

• Combinatorial Contracts
  Paul Dütting, Tomer Ezra, Michal Feldman, Thomas Kesselheim
  IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, FOCS’21, forthcoming
• Efficient Two-Sided Markets with Limited Information
  Paul Dütting, Federico Fusco, Philip Lazos, Stefano Leonardi, Rebecca Reiffenhäuser
  ACM Symposium on Theory of Computer Science, STOC’21, Rome, Italy (virtual)
• An O(log log m) Prophet Inequality for Subadditive Combinatorial Auctions
  Paul Dütting, Thomas Kesselheim, Brendan Lucier
  IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, FOCS’20, Durham, NC, USA (virtual)
• The Complexity of Contracts
  Paul Dütting, Tim Roughgarden, Inbal Talgam-Cohen
  ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, SODA’20, Salt Lake City, UT, USA
• Prophet Inequalities for I.I.D. Random Variables from an Unknown Distribution
  (ACM SIGecom Best Full Paper Award)
  Jose Correa, Paul Dütting, Felix Fischer, Kevin Schewior
  20th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, EC’19, Phoenix, AZ, USA
• Simple versus Optimal Contracts
  Paul Dütting, Tim Roughgarden, Inbal Talgam-Cohen
  20th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, EC’19, Phoenix, AZ, USA
• Posted Pricing and Prophet Inequalities with Inaccurate Priors
  Paul Dütting, Thomas Kesselheim
  20th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, EC’19, Phoenix, AZ, USA
• Optimal Auctions through Deep Learning
  Paul Dütting, Zhe Feng, Hari Narasimhan, David C. Parkes, Sai S. Ravindranath
  36th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML’19, Long Beach, CA, USA
• Prophet Inequalities Made Easy: Stochastic Optimization by Pricing Non-Stochastic Inputs
  Paul Dütting, Michal Feldman, Thomas Kesselheim, Brendan Lucier
  58th IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, FOCS’17, Berkeley, CA, USA
• Best-Response Dynamics in Combinatorial Auctions with Item Bidding
  Paul Dütting and Thomas Kesselheim
  28th ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, SODA’17, Barcelona, Spain

Some recent journal papers

• Prophet Inequalities for I.I.D. Random Variables from an Unknown Distribution
  Jose Correa, Paul Dütting, Felix Fischer, Kevin Schewior
  Mathematics of Operations Research, MOR’21+, accepted March 2021, forthcoming
• Best-Response Dynamics in Combinatorial Auctions with Item Bidding
  (Invited to Special Issue on STOC/FOCS/SODA 2016-2017)
  Paul Dütting, Thomas Kesselheim
  Games and Economic Behavior, GEB’20+, accepted September 2020, forthcoming
• Optimal Auctions through Deep Learning
  (Invited Research Highlight)
  Paul Dütting, Zhe Feng, Hari Narasimhan, David C. Parkes, Sai S. Ravindranath
  Communications of the ACM, CACM’20+, accepted April 2020, forthcoming
• The Complexity of Contracts
  Paul Dütting, Tim Roughgarden, Inbal Talgam-Cohen
  SIAM Journal on Computing, SICOMP’21, Volume 50, Issue 1, pages 211-254, January 2021
• Algorithms as Mechanisms: The Price of Anarchy of Relax and Round
  Paul Dütting, Thomas Kesselheim, Eva Tardos
  Mathematics of Operations Research, MOR’21, Volume 46, Issue 1, pages 317-335, January 2021
• Prophet Inequalities Made Easy: Stochastic Optimization by Pricing Nonstochastic Inputs
  Paul Dütting, Michal Feldman, Thomas Kesselheim, Brendan Lucier
  SIAM Journal on Computing, SICOMP’20, Volume 49, Number 3, pages 540-582, June 2020
• Expressiveness and Robustness of First-Price Position Auctions
  Paul Dütting, Felix Fischer, David C. Parkes
  Mathematics of Operations Research, MOR’19, Volume 44, Issue 1, Pages 196-211, February 2019
• The Performance of Deferred-Acceptance Auctions
  Paul Dütting, Vasilis Gkatzelis, Tim Roughgarden
  Mathematics of Operations Research, MOR’17, Volume 42, Issue 4, Pages 897-914, November 2017
• Modularity and Greed in Double Auctions
  Paul Dütting, Tim Roughgarden, Inbal Talgam-Cohen
  Games and Economic Behavior, GEB’17, Volume 105, Pages 59-83, September 2017

Click here for full list of publications.