Duke CS PhD Kangning Wang receives an Honorable Mention for SIGecom Dissertation Award

Duke CS PhD Kangning Wang receives an Honorable Mention for SIGecom Doctoral Dissertation Award

Duke CS PhD Kangning Wang received an Honorable Mention for his dissertation, “Approximations for Economic Efficiency and Fairness,” by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group for Economics and Computation (SIGecom) Doctoral Dissertation Award competition.

The SIGecom recognizes an outstanding dissertation in the field of economics and computation. The award is conferred annually at the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation.

“Kangning's thesis cleverly applies the approximation lens to make significant contributions to a broad set of topics: computational social choice, algorithmic fairness, and algorithmic pricing. In particular, it settles a long lasting problem in bilateral trade, showing a constant ratio between first-best and second-best in bilateral trade.”

Wang, now a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford Theory Group, received his PhD in 2022 from Duke, where he was advised by Kamesh Munagala. After receiving his doctorate, he was a JP Morgan Research Fellow in the Data-Driven Decision Processes program at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, UC Berkeley in Fall 2022.