From Algorithms to Impact: Phan’s Research Sparks Student Innovation

Poole College economics professor Will Phan’s research focuses on addressing problems in two-sided matching, which impacts people’s lives every day, from hiring decisions for workers and businesses to how students are assigned to schools.

The design of economic mechanisms that exchange or allocate resources, is applied in many other diverse ways: the process of pairing resident doctors with hospitals, the NFL draft — even NC State’s football ticket-distribution system. 

Phan studies the design of algorithms to match people in markets that are structured on two-sided matching.

“You have to design these algorithms well. Otherwise, people could manipulate them in some way. Maybe one mechanism is more favorable to firms rather than workers. You can create a system that’s somewhere in the middle. 

“The overarching goal of my research is to improve on the mechanisms,” Phan says, “so we can improve the welfare of the participants.”

Training New Economists

His scholarship energizes the classroom environment for students. 

Undergraduates in Phan’s economics senior thesis course play the role of economists by designing new matching mechanisms, using the three pillars of the research: efficiency, fairness and manipulation-free properties.

“In this class, my students get to reimagine the way things can be redone from an economics perspective. They’re designing the policy, the mechanism, the way resources get exchanged or allocated. They get to use their imagination to improve people’s welfare,” Phan says.

Instead of rote learning about economic concepts, students get valuable hands-on experience in a more engaging way that develops the skills they’ll need to stand out in their career. They design the algorithms themselves to come up with new mechanisms, rather than learning about someone else’s design.

“In class, we take the design process and the analysis of these mechanisms seriously. They do a very complete analysis. I think they have a fun time. If they want to design these economic mechanisms,” Phan says, “they really have to show how their way is better. They learn to appreciate the whole design process more.”

By working to make creative improvements to two-sided matching with their own original ideas, students gain confidence in their abilities, so they can excel in the workplace and impact markets and people’s lives in important ways.  

Students Helping Stores

In papers, students sometimes apply the concepts they discuss in Phan’s class to situations in their own lives.

A student who worked at a clothing store wrote about frustrations because of inventory glitches. “There was some corporate mismatch between what was being sent to the store and what was being demanded on the floor by customers,” Phan says.

u0022By incorporating his scholarship into the classroom, Phan gives students an opportunity to envision their future — and to influence positive change in the future.u0022

The student designed a feedback system for local stores and used analytics to create a way to send inventory requests to the corporate office. “These are definitely very relevant and implementable tactics” that students can use in their careers, he says.  

By incorporating his scholarship into the classroom, Phan gives students an opportunity to envision their future — and to influence positive change in the future.

“They’re going to be the ones designing policies after they graduate. They get some practice in the classroom, so they can put their skills to the test,” he says. “The sky’s the limit on their imagination.”     

This post was originally published in Poole College of Management News.