Upper School Intersession 2025

Suppose you need to match one million students to one thousand colleges. Students have preferences over colleges, and colleges have preferences over their applicants. Is there a "good" way to reconcile all these preferences on both sides -- and what does "good" even mean in this context? We are going to discuss the basics of matching theory, a research area at the intersection of Economics and Computer Science that develops tools for answering such questions. We will also discuss applications of this theory: matching young doctors to hospitals, students to schools, and cadets to army branches.

Matching theory is one of the key parts of the broader discipline of the design of economic mechanisms, and if time permits, we will briefly touch on some other topics in this discipline.

Pandemics! Geopolitics! Economics! Bad behavior! These are turbulent times and businesses and other organizations are encountering lots of new challenges and even full-fledged disasters. When it all goes wrong, how should organizations think about communicating? What are the rules of the road? The common mistakes? Which audiences matter? What do you do when the New York Times calls or social media explodes? We'll talk about all of this and explore some scenarios.