The invited plenary speaker for APPROX 2023 is Jan Vondrak (Standford).

Title: Welfare and Fairness in Combinatorial Allocation Problems

Abstract:

In contrast to the classical model of welfare maximization, various alternatives have been proposed that take fairness into account as well. I will focus on the notion of Nash social welfare, which is the geometric mean of the agents’ valuations, and has natural connections to some other notions of fairness. While optimizing Nash social welfare is generally more difficult than optimizing utilitarian welfare, our understanding of this objective has improved significantly over the last decade. I will survey the history of developments on this problem and the most recent results which show that Nash social welfare can be optimized to within similar guarantees as utilitarian welfare.