I am a Staff Research Scientist at Google Switzerland. Before joining Google, I was an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics at London School of Economics, where I still hold a role as visiting faculty. I work on problems at the intersection of Algorithms, Game Theory, Contract Theory, and Mechanism Design.

I received my PhD in Computer Science from EPFL Lausanne. My PhD advisor was Monika Henzinger. During my PhD I visited David Parkes at Harvard University, and I did a summer internship at Google. Afterwards, 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 am an alumnus of both the German and the Swiss National Academic Foundation. I have been awarded a Best Paper Award at WWW 2024, a Best Full Paper Award at EC 2019, and a Best Paper Award at EC 2012. I am one of the winners of the 2017/18 LSE Excellence in Education Awards.

Check out our survey on Algorithmic Contract Theory. Together with my great co-authors, I’m also working on a Book on Prophet Inequalities.

News

• [June 2026] Looking forward to co-organizing a coordinated tutorial and workshop on AI-Driven Reseaarch in EconCS at EC 2026.
• [February 2026] Our Multi-Agent Contracts paper was accepted to Journal of the ACM.
• [October 2025] Our paper Efficient Two-Sided Markets with Limited Information was accepted to SIAM Journal on Computing.
• [October 2025] Our paper When Contracts Get Complex: Information-Theoretic Barriers was accepted to SODA 2026.
• [September 2025] Our paper Trading Prophets was accepted to Operations Research.
• [August 2025] Our paper Combinatorial Contracts was accepted to SIAM Journal on Computing.
• [August 2025] Our paper Bias and Fairness in Online Selection was accepted to Operations Research.
• [July 2025] I gave a plenary talk about our Econometrica paper Ambiguous Contracts at Stony Brook.
• [July 2025] Our paper Nearly Tight Regret Bounds for Profit Maximization in Bilateral Trade was accepted to FOCS 2025.
• [May 2025] I will be teaching a mini-course on Secretaries and Prophets: A (Machine) Learning Perspective at AlgoML 2025 in Odense, Denmark.
• [May 2025] Very much looking forward to teaching a mini-course on Algorithmic Contract Theory at GAIMSS 2025 in Toulouse, France.
• [July 2025] Two papers accepted to EC 2025.
• [February 2025] Our paper The Cost of Consistency: Submodular Maximization with Constant Recourse was accepted to STOC 2025.
• [December 2024] Together with Michal Feldman and Inbal Talgam-Cohen, we just wrapped up Algorithmic Contract Theory: A Survey. The survey will be published in Foundations and Trends in Theoretical Computer Science.
• [December 2024] I will give a Keynote at WINE 2024 on our SODA 2025 paper Multi-Agent Combinatorial Contracts.
• [October 2024] Our paper Multi-Agent Combinatorial Contracts was accepted to SODA 2025.
• [September 2024] I gave a Keynote at SAGT 2024 on our Econometrica paper Ambiguous Contracts.
• [August 2024] I gave an ADFOCS 2024 summer school on “Prophet Inequalities” at Max-Planck Institute for Informatics. Follow link for slides and recordings.
• [July 2024] Our paper Ambiguous Contracts co-authored with Michal Feldman, Daniel Peretz, and Larry Samuelson was accepted to Econometrica.
• [July 2024] I gave a Plenary Talk at the EC2024 Workshop on Foundation Models and Game Theory about our WWW 2024 best paper Mechanism Design for Large Language Models.
• [July 2024] I gave a Plenary Talk at the INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section Conference about our WWW 2024 best paper Mechanism Design for Large Language Models.
• [June 2024] Very excited that our latest prophet inequality paper “Online Combinatorial Allocation and Auctions with Few Samples” was accepted to FOCS 2024.
• [June 2024] Together with John Horton (MIT) and Yash Kanoria (NYU Stern) I am co-organizing the INFORMS Workshop on Market Design at EC 2024.
• [May 2024] Excited to announce that our paper Mechanism Design for Large Language Models has received the Best Paper Award at WWW 2024. It was also selected as one of the papers under the ‘Highlights Beyond EC’ scheme at EC 2024.
• [May 2024] Two papers accepted to EC 2024, and one to ICML 2024. Looking forward to these conferences.
• [October 2023] Happy to share that our paper Combinatorial Contracts Beyond Gross Substitutes was accepted to SODA 2024
• [September 2023] Delighted that our paper Optimal Auctions through Deep Learning: Advances in Differentiable Economics was accepted for publication in the Journal of the ACM.

Selected publications

Multi-Agent Contracts
Paul Dütting, Tomer Ezra, Michal Feldman, Thomas Kesselheim
Journal of the ACM, JACM 2026, Vol. 73(2), Article No. 13, pp. 1-37, April 2026
(Extended Abstract in STOC 2023)
[pdf | arXiv | BibTex]
Efficient Two-Sided Markets with Limited Information
Paul Dütting, Federico Fusco, Philip Lazos, Stefano Leonardi, Rebecca Reiffenhäuser
SIAM Journal on Computing, SICOMP 2026, Vol. 55(1), pp.65-92, January 2026
(Extended Abstract in STOC 2021)
[pdf | arXiv | BibTex]
Combinatorial Contracts
Paul Dütting, Tomer Ezra, Michal Feldman, Thomas Kesselheim
SIAM Journal on Computing, SICOMP 2025, Vol. 54(6), pp. 1427-1455, December 2025
(Extended Abstract in FOCS 2021)
[pdf | arXiv | BibTex]
Nearly Tight Regret Bounds for Profit Maximization in Bilateral Trade
Simone Di Gregorio, Paul Dütting, Federico Fusco, Chris Schwiegelshohn
IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, FOCS 2025, Sydney, Australia
[pdf | arXiv | BibTex]
The Cost of Consistency: Submodular Maximization with Constant Recourse
Paul Dütting, Federico Fusco, Ashkan Norouzi-Fard, Silvio Lattanzi, Ola Svensson, Morteza Zadimoghaddam
ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, STOC 2025, Prague, Czech Republic
[arXiv]
Multi-Agent Combinatorial Contracts
Paul Dütting, Tomer Ezra, Michal Feldman, Thomas Kesselheim
ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, SODA 2025, New Orleans, LA, USA
[arXiv]
Online Combinatorial Allocations and Auctions with Few Samples
Paul Dütting, Thomas Kesselheim, Brendan Lucier, Rebecca Reiffenhäuser, Sahil Singla
IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, FOCS 2024, Chicago, IL, USA
[pdf | arXiv | BibTex]
Mechanism Design for Large Language Models
(Best Paper Award) (Highlights Beyond EC 2024)
Paul Dütting, Vahab Mirrokni, Renato Paes Leme, Haifeng Xu, Song Zuo
ACM The Web Conference, WWW 2024, Singapore
[pdf | arXiv | BibTex]
Ambiguous Contracts
Paul Dütting, Michal Feldman, Daniel Peretz, Larry Samuelson
Econometrica, ECMA 2024, Vol. 92, No. 6, pp. 1967–1992, November 2024
(Extended abstract in EC 2023)
[pdf | arXiv]
An O(log log m) Prophet Inequality for Subadditive Combinatorial Auctions
Paul Dütting, Thomas Kesselheim, Brendan Lucier
SIAM Journal on Computing, SICOMP 2024, Vol. 53(6), pp. 239-275, December 2024
(Extended Abstract in FOCS 2020)
[pdf | arXiv | ACM SIGecom Exchanges | BibTex
Optimal Auctions through Deep Leaning: Advances in Differentiable Economics
Paul Dütting, Zhe Feng, Hari Narasimhan, David C. Parkes, Sai S. Ravindranath
Journal of the ACM, JACM 2024, Vol.71(1), pp. 5:1-5:53, February 2024
(Extended abstract in ICML 2019)
[pdf | arXiv | BibTex]
Secretaries with Advice
Paul Dütting, Renato Paes Leme, Silvio Lattanzi, Sergei Vassilvitskii
Mathematics of Operations Research, MOR 2024, Vol. 49(2), pp. 856-879, 2024
(Extended Abstract in EC 2021)
[pdf | arXiv | BibTex]
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
Mathematics of Operations Research, MOR 2022, Vol. 47(2), pp. 1287-1309, May 2022
(Extended Abstract in EC 2019)
[pdf | arXiv | BibTex]
The Complexity of Contracts
Paul Dütting, Tim Roughgarden, Inbal Talgam-Cohen
SIAM Journal on Computing, SICOMP 2021, Vol. 50(1), pp. 211-254, January 2021
(Extended Abstract in SODA 2020)
[pdf | arXiv | BibTex
Prophet Inequalities made Easy: Stochastic Optimization by Pricing Non-Stochastic Inputs
Paul Dütting, Michal Feldman, Thomas Kesselheim, Brendan Lucier
SIAM Journal on Computing, SICOMP 2021, Vol. 50(1), pp. 211-254, January 2021
(Extended Abstract in FOCS 2017)
[pdf | arXiv | BibTex]
Simple versus Optimal Contracts
Paul Dütting, Tim Roughgarden, Inbal Talgam-Cohen
ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, EC 2019, Phoenix, AZ, USA
[pdf | arXiv | BibTex]

Check out full list of publications.