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Ludwig Dierks

About Me

I am a tenure-track assistant professor in the Information and Decision Science Department of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Additionally, I have a courtesy appointment with the Computer Science department. Before coming to Chicago, I visited the Multi-Agent Laboratory at Kyushu University as a SNSF Postdoc.Mobility Fellow. I study market design problems at the intersection of computer science, economics, and operations research in a variety of different domains such as cloud computing markets, drone airspace assignment, adoption from foster care, and subscription services.

 

I earned my PhD under Prof. Sven Seuken at the University of Zurich in 2021 and hold an M.Sc. in Mathematics in Operations Research from TU Munich. In 2018, I was a research intern in the Office of the Chief Economist of Microsoft.

Research

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a billion dollar market where providers provision computational resources that customers can then rent long-term or on demand. This domain is characterized by the tension between needing to guarantee  high resource availability while simultaneously maximizing the utilization of resources, merging economic and operational challenges. 

 

Adoption from Foster Care

Hundreds of thousands of children are in foster care in the US alone, with many going years without finding a permanent home. Finding good families, especially for children that are disadvantaged by various factors, is an important, but challenging, societal problem.

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Drone Airspace Allocation

Governments around the globe are currently overhauling their regulations for low altitude airspace to enable a rising number of unnamed aerial vehicle flights. A large number of heterogeneous, self interested drone operators, uncertainty about future demand and the computational complexity of finding optimal routes combine to a complex mechanism design problem. Current policy proposals such as a First-Come-First-Serve allocation still carry various limitations and inefficiencies that may lead to market failure once airspace is sufficiently congested.

 

Publications

Journal Publications
Peer-reviewed Conference and Workshop Publications
Ongoing Projects

  • Ludwig Dierks, Makoto Yokoo; Information Goods: Externality-Based Upgrades and Income Effects.

  • Ludwig Dierks, Vincent Slaugh and Utku Ünver; Adoption Platform Design to Improve
    Outcomes for Children with Disabilities.

  • Ludwig Dierks and Sven Seuken; Export Restrictions in the Face of COVID-19: A Game-Theoretic Analysis of Global Demand Shocks.

  • Ludwig Dierks, Jacob LaRiviere, Aadharsh Kannan, and Thomas Moscibroda; Efficiency Gains from Flexible Scheduling Policies in the Cloud.

Public Working Papers
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