The INFORMS Auctions and Market Design (AMD) is happy to announce the Market Design Impact Award.
The prize is awarded annually and is intended to recognize major contributions in market design. It may be awarded to one individual or a small team when the research is joint.
The award may be given for original research from the last 15 years that has made a lasting impact (directly or indirectly) on the field and/or the practice of market design.
Nomination Procedure
Anyone in the market design community may nominate a candidate. The committee is seeking nominations, which include a nomination letter and two letters of recommendation, highlighting the nominee's accomplishments with emphasis on the criteria for the award. Please send nominations to amdimpactaward@gmail.com by July 30 with the subject “Market Design Submission”
- A nomination letter of no more than 1000 words describing the content of the contributions.
- Bibliographic data (and links or the papers) as needed.
- One-two sentences that describe the contribution.
- At least two (and most three) endorsement letters that describe in at most 500 words the lasting contribution, significance, and impact of the paper(s) and work. The letters should specify the relationship of the endorser to the nominees. The nominator should solicit these letters.
The Award Committee welcomes questions from anyone considering or intending to submit a nomination. The committee may be contacted by email at amdimpactaward@gmail.com.
The winner(s) will be recognized at the AMD business meeting of the 2025 INFORMS Annual Meeting.
Committee 2025
Jose Correa, University of Chile
Alvin Roth, Stanford University
David Shmoys, Cornell University
Winner 2025
Avinatan Hassidim, Assaf Romm, and Ran Shorrer
David Shmoys (left) presenting the 2025 INFORMS AMD Market Design Impact Award to the winners
Quote from the committee:
The inaugural (2025) INFORMS AMD Market Design Impact Award is given to Avinatan Hassidim, Assaf Romm, and Ran Shorrer (HRS) for their pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of market design, and for their striking empirical discoveries concerning behavioral market design.
Over the past decade, HRS (and coauthors) have redesigned and implemented matching platforms that directly improved the lives of thousands of people. Their work includes the creation of centralized clearinghouses for Israel’s Psychology Master’s admissions and the Pre-Military Academy programs, as well as contributions to the redesign of the Israeli medical internship match. These efforts addressed real-world complexities such as non-standard preferences and diversity-seeking institutions, as well as political constraints needed to gain consensus among the participants, while ensuring that the resulting systems remained practical and transparent.
Their research did not stop at implementation. In a landmark study, they documented that even in strategy-proof systems, applicants often make systematic mistakes, reporting obviously dominated preferences, such as preferring non-subsidized offers over subsidized ones in the same program. This discovery provided some of the first real-world evidence that behavior, even in strategy-proof mechanisms, can diverge from theoretical predictions, which helped give rise to the field now known as behavioral market design. Their insights have since inspired a growing body of research that examines how participants interact with markets and how mechanisms can be better explained and simplified to promote truthful reporting.
Through this mix of rigorous theory, innovative design, and attention to human behavior, HRS have substantially advanced both the theory and practice of market design, exemplifying how it can address pressing social needs.