Research map / Learning theory and algorithms / Submodular and game algorithms
Matching markets and welfare
Analyze matching and social-welfare optimization with strategic or learning agents in platforms.
119 accepted papers at ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR and AAAI (2016–2026) · an approach in Submodular and game algorithms, keyword cluster “voting · allocation · agents”
State History Tried Preprints Who Export
Where it stands
Not enough benchmark data Fewer than four papers report the same benchmark, so there is no record to follow.
28 papers in 2023–24 and 27 in 2025–26 (at ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR and AAAI); its share of the topic shrank, from 13.8% to 11.2%.
How this is decided
A benchmark is tracked when at least four papers of this approach report their own method on the same dataset and metric in at least two different years. Its record is the best number reported up to 2024 compared with the best reported in 2025–26: still improving means at least 1% better, flat means at most 0.2% better with at least two papers from 2025–26 trying. Numbers on a different scale from the rest (a fraction among percentages) and far outliers are left out. Results come from different papers with different setups, so they are signals, not head-to-head comparisons. The share of papers is counted at ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR and AAAI.
How it got here
Most cited paper of each year
- 2016 · "8 Amazing Secrets for Getting More Clicks": Detecting Clickbaits in News Streams Using Article Informality (AAAI 2016 · 188 citations)
- 2017 · StructInf: Mining Structural Influence from Social Streams (AAAI 2017 · 33 citations)
- 2018 · On Misinformation Containment in Online Social Networks (NeurIPS 2018 · 31 citations)
- 2019 · Discrimination in Online Markets: Effects of Social Bias on Learning from Reviews and Policy Design (NeurIPS 2019 · 12 citations)
- 2020 · The Smoothed Possibility of Social Choice (NeurIPS 2020 · 13 citations)
- 2021 · Welfare Guarantees in Schelling Segregation (AAAI 2021 · 21 citations)
- 2022 · Online Elicitation of Necessarily Optimal Matchings (AAAI 2022 · 4 citations)
- 2023 · When Congestion Games Meet Mobile Crowdsourcing: Selective Information Disclosure (AAAI 2023 · 9 citations)
- 2024 · Social-Aware Group Display Configuration in VR Conference (AAAI 2024 · 4 citations)
- 2025 · Learning to Manipulate Under Limited Information (AAAI 2025 · 4 citations)
- 2026 · Adaptive Multi-Round Allocation with Stochastic Arrivals (ICML 2026 · 0 citations)
Earliest papers here
- "8 Amazing Secrets for Getting More Clicks": Detecting Clickbaits in News Streams Using Article Informality (AAAI 2016 · 188 citations)
- Blind, Greedy, and Random: Algorithms for Matching and Clustering Using Only Ordinal Information (AAAI 2016 · 51 citations)
- Resistance to Corruption of Strategic Argumentation (AAAI 2016 · 15 citations)
What has been tried
90 papers here report 597 measured changes (a component added, removed or swapped, compared with a baseline): helped 62%, no clear effect 7%, hurt 24%, mixed 7%. Papers mostly publish changes that helped, so "helped" is over-represented.
Ablations in recent papers
| What was changed | Measured on | Result | Effect | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Use binary cross-entropy instead of mean-squared error for the loss | Uniform utility model · manipulation performance | No clear effect | Learning to Manipulate Under Limited Information (AAAI 2025 · 4 citations) | |
| Remove the trick of running MIPs only when needed | Public project, 6–10 agents · gap to theoretical upper bound | WCT-1 min gaps: 0.1830, 0.0933, 0.0939, 0.1917, 0.3086; WCT min gaps: 0.1775, 0.0888, 0.0973, 0.1329, 0.2576 | Mixed | Worst-Case VCG Redistribution Mechanism Design Based on the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (AAAI 2024 · 2 citations) |
| replace direct rounding with partition rounding | multi-task peer prediction · sensitivity | exactly \sqrt{K} times | Helped | Stochastically Dominant Peer Prediction (NeurIPS 2025 · 0 citations) |
Recent preprints
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Who publishes on it
Institutions on the most papers of this approach since 2023 (of 55 papers; from OpenAlex and the papers' affiliations).
- University of California, Berkeley · 5 papers
- University of Chicago · 4 papers
- University of Virginia · 3 papers
- University of Wisconsin - Madison · 3 papers
- University of Technology Sydney · 2 papers
- Delhi Technological University · 2 papers
- The University of Tokyo · 2 papers
- University of Warsaw · 2 papers
- Pennsylvania State University · 2 papers
- Meta · 2 papers
Use it
Download BibTeX of 40 key papersOpen the topic in the interactive map
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Related approaches
Same keyword cluster
- Learned auction design (105 papers)
- Fair division of indivisible goods (130 papers)
- Committee voting rules (120 papers)
Elsewhere in the topic
- Opponent modeling and subgame solving (116 papers)
- Monotone submodular maximization (116 papers)
- Zero-sum game learning dynamics (107 papers)
- Correlated equilibria in sequential games (86 papers)
- Streaming submodular algorithms (73 papers)
- Submodular influence maximization (33 papers)
- Equilibrium solvers for adversarial games (25 papers)
Benchmark numbers, ablations and baseline numbers are extracted by AI from each paper's full text and can be wrong; the paper is the authority. Data: results index of 2026-11-02, citation counts from OpenAlex (2026-10-09).