EC 2026 Workshop

INFORMS Workshop on Market Design

Rome, Italy, July 6, 2026 (Monday)

About the Workshop

The 2026 INFORMS Workshop on Market Design will be held on July 6th, 2026 in conjunction with the EC 2026 conference. The workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners that work on market design, and will represent a broad range of perspectives from more theoretical to more applied and empirical work. As with previous iterations, the workshop is sponsored and organized by the INFORMS Section on Auctions and Market Design, i.e., the workshop is a successor of the earlier editions, going all the way to 2018.

Workshop Theme

Market design is a field of applied and theoretical research that sits comfortably on the intersection of computer science, economics, and operations research. In recent decades, the theory and applications of market design have blossomed. In this workshop, we will focus on a set of promising, new applications of market design. In particular, we are interested in applications of market design which involve optimization with complex allocation constraints, vast datasets and machine learning, and dynamic pricing issues. We also want to explore research areas which, despite receiving theoretical attention, have not yet made an impact on practice. We are also interested in empirical work on evaluating mechanisms and approaches in practice. Topics include but are not limited to:

Machine learning and generative AI in market design
Mathematical optimization in markets
Pricing and competitive equilibria in markets
Iterative multi-object auctions
Matching with constraints and complex preferences

Format: Invited Talks + Posters

The workshop will be held in conjunction with EC 2026 at Rome, Italy. Please see the EC website for details on how to register for the conference and the workshop.

There will be 4 invited talks, 45 minutes each from academics and practitioners in Computer Science, Economics, and Operations Research. In addition, there will be a one hour contributed poster session. Please see the rubric "Call for Posters" below on instructions how to submit your work.

Speakers

Lawrence M. Ausubel

University of Maryland

Thanh Nguyen

Purdue University

Sasa Pekec

Duke University

Xizhi Tan

Stanford University

Call for Posters

The workshop will be held on July 6th, 2026 in conjunction with the EC 2026 conference at Rome, Italy.

In addition to invited talks the workshop will feature a one hour poster session on recent work broadly related to market design, including applied, theoretical and empirical work. To submit a poster for consideration, please send an abstract of no more than 300 words via email to informs-market-design-workshop@googlegroups.com

Submission deadline: 11:59 pm PT on Monday, June 15.
Accept/reject notifications: Wednesday, June 24.

For each author, please indicate if they are a PhD student or postdoc, and if they are on the academic job market. Job market candidates are especially encouraged to submit their work.

Venue