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The first workshop on Mechanism Design for Social Good (MD4SG '17) will be held in conjunction with the 18th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC '17) at MIT in Cambridge, MA on June 26, 2017, and will feature invited speakers, paper presentations, and a panel discussion with researchers in the EconCS community.

Synopsis: The EC community has made great contributions both to the development of theoretical foundations and applications of mechanism design. Key application domains have so far included ad auctions and electronic commerce, cloud computing, fair division, kidney donation, and school choice. In this workshop, we will focus on a set of promising applications of mechanism design that deal with access to opportunity including low-income housing, refugee resettlement, healthcare, and education. In each of these domains, the government and citizens design allocation policies, impose tax structures, create laws, and regulate activities. These are all mechanism design problems with the unifying property that progress has the potential to significantly improve societal welfare.

The workshop will have three main components:

Invited talks from domain experts in fields such as public policy and economics.
Presentations of submitted papers by members of the EC community.
A panel of researchers with experience applying theoretical insights to areas with social good objectives.

The goal of this workshop is fourfold:

Expose the EC community to new research directions through invited talks.
Engage the workshop attendees with domain experts to foster future learning and collaboration opportunities.
Jointly brainstorm and formalize research problems that the community can work on.
Highlight existing work in the community that falls under this theme.

More generally, we see this workshop as part of a broader goal to create and raise interest in different mechanism design problems with a social good objective.

Organizers: Rediet Abebe and Kira Goldner
Contact: organizers@md4sg.com