Talk That Science podcast on Matching Mechanisms

The podcast 'Talk That Science' hosted by (graduate) students from the Master of Logic has brought out an episode on Matching Mechanisms with Daniela Loustalot Knapp, a recent graduate from the Master of Logic.

Matching is the abstraction of a problem that arises in many real-world situations and consists of making pairs of individuals from two groups that have preferences over the other group. Examples include organ donation programs, house allocations and matching kids to schools. In this episode, we discuss how different algorithms (or mechanisms) have different normative properties. This means that choosing and designing matching algorithms is not just a mathematical problem. Talking about matching means talking about how to divide limited goods or places as fairly as possible. Furthermore, Daniela recently wrote a thesis on justifying matching algorithms. The idea is to provide non-experts with a step-by-step explanation of why the computed assignment is a good compromise between all the agents’ preferences, grounded in a set of principles that are appealing to them. This work is in line with an upcoming trend in (computational) social choice, called explainibility in social choice. We touch upon this in the last part of the episode.