Alfredo Torrico's Homepage

I am an Assistant Professor in the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISE) at the University of Southern California.

Before joining USC, I was an assistant research professor in the Center for Data Science for Enterprise and Society (CDSES) at Cornell University. During 2019-2022, I was a postdoc at the CERC in Data Science, Polytechnique Montréal. In 2019, I obtained my Ph.D. in Operations Research from Georgia Tech and, in 2013, my Mathematical Engineering degree (B.Eng. and M.S. in Applied Math equivalent) from Universidad de Chile.

Research Interests

The main goal of my research agenda is to bridge theory and practice by using applied modeling and methodological tools from optimization, game theory and algorithm design to analyze pressing challenges that public and private services face in urban centers.

My most recent projects have been focused on understanding the solution space in high-stakes settings when different desiderata (e.g., efficiency, welfare and revenue) are considered, and the trade-offs thereof. Some examples include:

data-driven congestion pricing and its application to Bogotá,
capacity planning in centralized markets (e.g., school choice systems) and its application to the Chilean Pre-K admission process.
efficiency and design challenges faced by choice-based matching platforms such as dating, outsourcing and lodging apps (e.g., Bumble, Upwork and Airbnb).

Contact

atorrico [at] usc [dot] edu

News

Aug 2025 > Joined USC as an Assistant Professor.
May 2025 > "Stable Matching with Contingent Priorities" was accepted in EC'25.
Nov 2024 > New preprint "Revenue Maximization in Choice-based Matching Markets" (with D. Nissim and D. Segev).
Oct 2024 > Talk at the 2024 INFORMS Annual Meeting.
Sept 2024 > New preprint "Stable Matching with Contingent Priorities" (with F. Bobbio, M. Carvalho and I. Rios).
July 2024 > Talks at EC, RMP and ISMP.
July 2024 > New preprint "Equitable Congestion Pricing under the Markovian Traffic Model: An Application to Bogota" (with N. Boonsiriphatthanajaroen, N. Garg, A. Lodi, H. Mainguy).
May 2024 > "Equitable Congestion Pricing under the Markovian Traffic Model: An Application to Bogota" was accepted at EC'24.
Apr 2024 > Talk at the Workshop on Combinatorial Optimization for Online Platforms, BIRS 2024.
Mar 2024 > Talk at INFORMS Optimization Society Conference 2024.
Mar 2024 > New preprint "Two-sided Assortment Optimization: Adaptivity Gaps and Approximation Algorithms" (with O. El Housni and U. Hennebelle)
Jan 2024 > "Adaptivity Gaps in Two-sided Assortment Optimization" was accepted at IPCO'24.
Oct 2023 > Talk at the 2023 INFORMS Annual Meeting.
Aug 2023 > New preprint "Platform Design in Curated Dating Markets" (with I. Rios).
May 2023 > Talks at the Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) Workshop and the SIAM Conference on Optimization 2023.
May 2023 > "Capacity Planning in Stable Matching: An Application to School Choice" was accepted in EC'23.
May 2023 > Co-organized the Data-Driven Urban Tech Workshop at Cornell Tech, May 15-17, 2023.
Feb 2023 > Talk at the CMOR Department, Rice University.
Jan 2023 > Talk at Roberto Cominetti's Fest (Workshop on Optimization, Learning and Games).
Oct 2022 > Talk at the 2022 INFORMS Annual Meeting.
Oct 2022 > Joined the CDSES at Cornell University as an Assistant Research Professor.

Teaching

Spring 2023, Cornell University: Revenue Optimization and Marketplace Design, ORIE 4154/5154 (UG/Masters)

Academic Service and Activities

Judge committee: George Nicholson Student Paper Competition (2024 - 2025), Applied Probability Society Student Paper Competition (2025-2026)
Organizing committee: Data-Driven Urban Tech Workshop (May 2023).
Journal reviewer: Operations Research, INFORMS Journal on Computing, Mathematical Programming, Management Science, Mathematics of Operations Research, Computers and Operations Research, Journal on Combinatorial Optimization, Optimization Letters, SIAM Journal on Optimization, Networks, Transportation Research Part C, European Journal of Operational Research.
Conference reviewer: IPCO (2020 - 2023), NeurIPS (2021, 2022), ICML (2022, 2023), ICLR (2022), LATIN (2022), SODA (2023).
Tutorial: Submodular optimization and the greedy algorithm. IFORS Newsletter, December 2021 issue.
Session chair at the INFORMS Annual Meeting (2017 - 2025).
Co-founder of the Ph.D. Student Seminar series at ISyE, Gatech.

Research Interests

Contact

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News

Teaching

Academic Service and Activities