YAIR TAUMAN, PHD

Leading Professor and Director
Stony Brook University

Yair Tauman is a Professor of Economics at State University of New York, Stony Brook and the Director of the Stony Brook Center for Game Theory. He studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he obtained his B.Sc. in Mathematics and Statistics and M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Mathematics, the latter two under the supervision of Robert Aumann. His areas of research interests are game theory and industrial organization. He has published, among others, in Econometrica, Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Economic Theory, Quarterly Journal of Economics and RAND Journal of Economics.

Tauman has been the organizer of the longest and most established series of International Summer Conferences in Game Theory (for over 25 years at Stony Brook University) and has been on the Faculty at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management and served as the dean of the business school at the Interdisciplinary Center in Hertzliya, Israel. Since 2009 he has served as the academic director of the Zell entrepreneurship program in the Interdisciplinary Center in Hertzliya.

In 2005, Tauman led a small group of Israeli investors to interfere with a takeover of online auction company QXL which was then sold for $1.9 Billion dollars. Tauman co-founded Bidorbuy.com and has served as a member of the board of directors for the following companies: ADFVN, Digi-block, Radware, and Expo-bee.

ABSTRACT

Matching Boys and Girls in Dating Clubs and its Applications to Kidney Exchanges and to the Allocation of Residents to Hospitals

Alvin Roth (Stanford) and the late Lloyd Shapley (UCLA), both members of the Stony Brook Center for Game Theory, were awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 2012 for their work on market design and matching theory. The theory relates to how people and companies find and select one another in everything from marriage to school choice to jobs and to organ donations. Their work primarily applies to markets without prices. The laureates’ breakthroughs involve figuring out how to properly assign people and things to stable matches when prices are not available to help buyers and sellers pair up. My talk will introduce briefly a simple and clever algorithm behind the theory and will emphasize its real-life applications.