I am a Senior Research Scientist at Google 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, 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. Before joining Google, I was an Assistant/Associate Professor of Mathematics at London School of Economics.

I was awarded a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship and a Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoc Grant. I am an alumnus of both the German and the Swiss National Academic Foundation. I have been awarded a Best Full Paper Award at EC’19 and a Best Paper Award at EC’12. I am one of the winners of the 2017/18 LSE Excellence in Education Awards.

News

• I am co-organizing an EC’22 workshop on Algorithmic Contract Design: Present and Future.
• I am giving a tutorial on “Algorithmic Contract Theory” at the STOC’22 TheoryFest Workshop Optimizing the Effort of Others: From Algorithmic Contracts to Strategic Classification. Slides: Part 1 and Part 2.
• I gave a survey talk about “Prophet Inequalities and Posted pricing with Samples” at the Virtual Chair Semester on Prophets (slides).
• I gave a talk in the Warwick DIMAP Seminar about our FOCS’20 paper on prophet inequalities for subadditive combinatorial auctions. See talk announcement and slides.
• I joined the faculty of the Virtual Chair Prophets Institute.
• I presented our work on prophet inequalities and posted pricing for combinatorial auctions at the 6th Google Market Algorithms Workshop.
• My student Andres Cristi, co-supervised with Jose Correa, was awarded the 2021 Facebook Fellowship in Economics and Computation. Congrats!
• I will give a talk in the Israel AGT Seminar on our recent FOCS’20 paper on prophet inequalities for subadditive combinatorial auctions.
• I joined the newly established Zurich Center for Market Design as an affiliate.
• I will give a keynote on algorithmic contract theory to the ATHENA organization at Google Research.
• Keynote at SAGT’20 on “Contract Theory: A New Frontier for AGT”.
• 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 LSEfrom August 2019 onwards.
• I have been granted a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant on “Contract Theory through the Algorithmic Lens”, March 7, 2019.
• Invited talk at the 5th Google Market Algorithms Workshop on deep learning for auctions 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

• Multi-Agent Contracts
  Paul Dütting, Tomer Ezra, Michal Feldman, Thomas Kesselheim
  ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, STOC’23, Orlando, FL, USA, forthcoming
• Single-Sample Prophet Inequalities via Greedy-Ordered Selection
  Constantine Caramanis, Paul Dütting, Matthew Faw, Federico Fusco, Philip Lazos, Stefano Leonardo, Orestis Papadigenopoulos, Emmanouil Pountourakis, Rebecca Reiffenhäuser
  ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, SODA’22, Alexandria, VA, USA (virtual), forthcoming
• Combinatorial Contracts
  Paul Dütting, Tomer Ezra, Michal Feldman, Thomas Kesselheim
  IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, FOCS’21, Boulder, CO, USA (virtual), 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
  (EC 2019 Best Full Paper Award)
  Jose Correa, Paul Dütting, Felix Fischer, Kevin Schewior
  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
  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
  IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, FOCS’17, Berkeley, CA, USA.

Some recent journal papers

• An O(log log m) Prophet Inequality for Subadditive Combinatorial Auctions
  (Invited to Special Issue on FOCS 2020)
  Paul Dütting, Thomas Kesselheim, Brendan Lucier
  SIAM Journal on Computing, SICOMP’21+, accepted December 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’22, Volume 134, Pages 428-448, July 2022
• Prophet Inequalities for Independent and Identically Distributed Random Variables from an Unknown Distribution
  (Based on EC 2019 Best Full Paper)
  Jose Correa, Paul Dütting, Felix Fischer, Kevin Schewior
  Mathematics of Operations Research, MOR’22, Volume 47, Issue 2, Pages 1287-1309, May 2022
• 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’21, Vol. 64 No. 8, Pages 109-116, July 2021
• 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.