Date: April 13, 2026
Time: 3:45-5 p.m.
Location: Gates Hall, 122 or Click here to attend via Zoom
Speaker: Chido Onyeze
Abstract: In this talk, we study the problem of repeatedly allocating a shareable good among multiple agents. In each round, a principal decides whether to allocate the good and, if so, which agents receive access. Each agent has a private valuation for access in each round, drawn independently over time from a joint distribution that may be arbitrarily correlated across agents. The principal’s goal is to ensure that each agent derives high utility from the allocated rounds, subject to a packing constraint on the allocation. At the same time, agents are strategic and act to maximize their own utility, potentially at the expense of others.
We ask whether, in the presence of such selfish behavior, there exist mechanisms that achieve outcomes that are both efficient and fair. To address this, we introduce the notion of the core as a benchmark for efficiency and fairness in this setting. We then show that a simple artificial-money mechanism approximately implements the core at equilibrium. Our approach utilizes a monetary mechanism as a black box, revealing a surprising connection between classical notions of efficiency in monetary mechanisms and the equilibrium properties of the resulting artificial-money mechanism.
Based on joint work with David Lin, Sid Banerjee and Éva Tardos
Bio: Onyeze is a 3rd year Computer Science Ph.D. student at Cornell University. He is advised by Éva Tardos. His research interests lie in Game Theory, Learning in Games and Resource Allocation Problems.
Before starting at Cornell, he recieved a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from Georgia Tech where he worked with Dr. Cassie S. Mitchell, Dr. Prasad Tetali and Dr. Lutz Warnke on various projects in Extremal Combinatorics and Randomized Algorithms.