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.

In this interactive session, participants will discuss some of the legal and policy issues underlying free speech and privacy rights, and the potential conflicts between the two with the rise of new technologies like the Internet.  Real-life cases brought by the ACLU will be used to illustrate how public interest litigation cases are developed to create and change laws, and the potential clashes that can occur between competing civil rights and policy goals.