On the Problem of Assigning PhD Grants

On the Problem of Assigning PhD Grants

Katarína Cechlárová, Laurent Gourvès, Julien Lesca

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 130-136. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/19

In this paper, we study the problem of assigning PhD grants. Master students apply for PhD grants on different topics and the number of available grants is limited. In this problem, students have preferences over topics they applied to and the university has preferences over possible matchings of student/topic that satisfy the limited number of grants. The particularity of this framework is the uncertainty on a student's decision to accept or reject a topic offered to him. Without using probability to model uncertainty, we study the possibility of designing protocols of exchanges between the students and the university in order to construct a matching which is as close as possible to the optimal one i.e., the best achievable matching without uncertainty.
Keywords:
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Economic Paradigms, Auctions and Market-Based Systems
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Computational Social Choice
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Resource Allocation