Mithun Chakraborty

My broad research interests are in multi-agent systems, computational economics and finance, and artificial intelligence. I apply techniques from algorithmic game theory, statistical machine learning, decision theory, etc. to a variety of problems at the intersection of the computational and social sciences. A major focus of my research has been the design and analysis of market-making algorithms for financial markets and, in particular, prediction markets — incentive-based mechanisms for aggregating data in the form of private beliefs about uncertain events (e.g. the outcome of an election) distributed among strategic agents. I use both analytical and simulation-based methods to investigate the impact of factors such as wealth, risk attitude, manipulative behavior, etc. on information aggregation in market ecosystems. Another line of work I am pursuing involves algorithms for allocating resources based on preference data collected from potential recipients, satisfying efficiency, fairness, and diversity criteria; my joint work on ethnicity quotas in Singapore public housing allocation deserves special mention in this vein. More recently, I have got involved in research on empirical game-theoretic analysis, a family of methods for building tractable models of complex, procedurally defined games from empirical/simulated payoff data and using them to reason about game outcomes.