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.

News

• [May 2025] I am very much looking forward to teaching a course on “Prophet Inequalities: A (Machine) Learning Perspective” at PhD School on Intersections of Algorithms and Machine Learning Theory in Odense, Denmark.
• [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. Thanks to the organizers for inviting me!
• [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. Thanks to the organizers for inviting me!
• [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. Thanks to the organizers for inviting me!
• [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. Thanks to the organizers for inviting me!
• [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

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, forthcoming
[arXiv]
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]
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, forthcoming
[arXiv]
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]
Multi-Agent Contracts
Paul Dütting, Tomer Ezra, Michal Feldman, Thomas Kesselheim
ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, STOC 2023, Orlando, FL, USA
[pdf | arXiv | BibTex]
Combinatorial Contracts
Paul Dütting, Tomer Ezra, Michal Feldman, Thomas Kesselheim
IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, FOCS 2021, Boulder, CO, USA (virtual)
[pdf | arXiv | BibTex]
Efficient Two-Sided Markets with Limited Information
Paul Dütting, Federico Fusco, Philip Lazos, Stefano Leonardi, Rebecca Reiffenhäuser
ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, STOC 2021, Rome, Italy (virtual)
[pdf | arXiv | BibTex]
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 2020, Durham, NC, USA (virtual)
[pdf | arXiv | ACM SIGecom Exchanges | 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
ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, EC 2019, Phoenix, AZ, USA
[pdf | arXiv | BibTex]
The Complexity of Contracts
Paul Dütting, Tim Roughgarden, Inbal Talgam-Cohen
ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, SODA 2020, Salt Lake City, UT, USA
[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]
Prophet Inequalities made Easy: Stochastic Optimization by Pricing Non-Stochastic Inputs
Paul Dütting, Michal Feldman, Thomas Kesselheim, Brendan Lucier
IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, FOCS 2017, Berkeley, CA, USA
[pdf | arXiv | BibTex]

Check out full list of publications.