greece
Algorithms
Data Science
Artificial Intelligence
Title: From Monopoly to Competition: When Do Optimal Contests Prevail?
Presenter: Prof. Ron Lavi (U. of Bath, UK)
Abstract: We study competition among simultaneous heterogeneous contest designers, allowing a large contest design space. Symmetric contestants choose a contest and each contest designer aims to maximize the contestants’ sum of efforts exerted in her contest. We show that optimal contests in the monopolistic setting (i.e., those that maximize the sum of efforts in a model with a single contest designer) form Pareto-optimal equilibria when contest designers compete. Under a natural assumption, monopolistic optimal contests are in fact dominant in the competitive case, and the equilibria they form are unique. In many natural cases, they also maximize the social welfare.
Joint work with Xiaotie Deng, Yotam Gafni, Tao Lin, and Hongyi Ling
Short Bio: Ron Lavi is a reader (associate professor) at the economics department, University of Bath, UK. His research focuses on subjects on the border of economics and computation, mainly algorithmic game theory, auction theory, and the efficient design of economic mechanisms. He completed his doctoral studies in computer science at the Hebrew University, Israel, and his post-doctoral studies at the California Institute of Technology. He was a faculty member at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology during 2006 – 2023, a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley during 2013 - 2015, and a consultant / academic visitor at Google, Microsoft research, and Yahoo! Labs.
To position Greece as a leading player in AI and Data Science
To build an AI Excellence Hub in Greece where the international research community can connect, groundbreaking ideas can thrive, and the next generation of scientists emerges, shaping a brighter future for Greece and the world
Welcome to ARCHIMEDES, a vibrant research hub connecting the global AI and Data Science research community fostering groundbreaking research in Greece and beyond. Its dedicated core team, comprising lead researchers, affiliated researchers, Post-Docs, PhDs and interns, is committed to advancing basic and applied research in Artificial Intelligence and its supporting disciplines, including Algorithms, Statistics, Learning Theory, and Game Theory organized around 8 core research areas. By collaborating with Greek and Foreign Universities and Research Institutes, ARCHIMEDES disseminates its research findings fostering knowledge exchange and providing enriching opportunities for students. Leveraging AI to address real-world challenges, ARCHIMEDES promotes innovation within the Greek ecosystem and extends its societal impact. Established in January 2022, as a research unit of the Athena Research Center with support from the Committee Greece 2021, ARCHIMEDES is funded for its first four years by the EU Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF).
The Archimedes Research Unit, part of the Athena Research Center, Greece, participated in this year's 89th Thessaloniki International Fair, which took place from September 6 to 14, 2025.
On Thursday, 11 September, 2025, from 11:00 am to 12:30 pm, at the Archimedes Amphitheatre (1 Artemidos Street, 15125, Marousi, Archimedes, Athena Research Center, Greece), Professor Elias Koutsoupias of the University of Oxford, UK, will deliver a talk on "The Communication Complexity of Combinatorial Auctions in Graphs."
A new paper co-authored by John Pavlopoulos from Archimedes Research Unit at the Athena Research Center, Kanella K. Pouliand Maria Gavriilidou from the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) at the Athena Research Center, and Juli Bakagianni from the Department of Informatics of the Athens University of Economics & Business (AUEB) has been accepted for publication at Patterns journal.
Upcoming workshop on Dialect NLP on “Standardization and Variation for Dialect Varieties with Universal Dependencies as an Application Framework” coming up. We are excited to announce that the Dialect NLP team at Archimedes, Athena Research Center, Greece, is organizing a workshop in collaboration with the MaiNLP Research Lab at Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) of Munich.
The Archimedes Unit of the Athena Research Center, Greece is pleased to announce a new series of experientialworkshops on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language, focusing on their contribution to and interaction with linguistic sciences.
The project “ARCHIMEDES Unit: Research in Artificial Intelligence, Data Science and Algorithms” with code OPS 5154714 is implemented by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan “Greece 2.0” and is funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU.
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