#  Cardinal-Utility Matching Markets: Pricing is Intractability, but Nash Bargaining Works!  

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **October 24, 2025** 

 01:30PM - 02:30PM EDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **SEC LL2.221**  



 

 



 

**Vijay Vazirani (UC Irvine)**

**Cardinal-Utility Matching Markets: Pricing is Intractability, but Nash Bargaining Works!**   
  
For a mechanism to be truly impactful, it must combine strong game-theoretic properties with computational efficiency -- a classic example is the Gale–Shapley (1962) stable matching algorithm. This talk focuses on cardinal-utility matching markets, for which the most well known mechanism is the pricing-based approach of Hylland and Zeckhauser (1979). While this mechanism satisfies several desirable game-theoretic properties, recent work has shown it to be computationally intractable, both in theory and in practice.  
  
This talk will review a series of papers that:  
a) establish this intractability;  
b) propose an alternative mechanism based on Nash bargaining;   
c) demonstrate that this new mechanism achieves game-theoretic and computational guarantees; and  
d) provide evidence that significantly better alternatives are unlikely.  
  
This talk is self contained and is based on these ([1](https://ics.uci.edu/~vazirani/VY.pdf), [2](https://ics.uci.edu/~vazirani/NBalg.pdf), [3](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.10704), [4](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.02024), [5](https://ics.uci.edu/~vazirani/MOR-EFPO.pdf)) and related papers.



 

 



 

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