Anushka Murthy

Anushka Murthy

PhD Student at Stanford University

About Me

I am a PhD student at Stanford advised by Ramesh Johari and Irene Lo, and I also work closely with Gabriel Weintraub. I grew up in Michigan and completed my B.S. in Applied Math and CS at Columbia University. Up until the beginning of grad school I was primarily interested in Probability Theory and Theoretical CS, but now I am mostly interested in using techniques from these areas to study problems in Contract Theory and Market Design. At Stanford, I am affiliated with the Operations Research group in the MS&E department, the Data Science Center, and the Society and Algorithms Lab. I’m also thankful to be supported by a Stanford Data Science Scholarship, NSF Graduate Fellowship, and an EDGE Doctoral Fellowship.

News

  • [October 2024] : I will be giving a talk at INFORMS ‘24 in Seattle as a part of the session on “Randomized Experiments, A/B Tests, and Observational Studies.” I’ll be presenting our paper, “Quantifying the Effect of Interference on Platform Decisions.”
  • [September 2024]: Excited to join the 2024-2026 cohort of the Stanford Data Science Scholars Program!
  • [July 2024]: I will be giving a talk at MSOM 2024 at the University of Minnesota on our “Dynamic Contracting for PES Programs” paper.
  • [October 2023] : I will be attending EAAMO’23 at Boston University and giving a talk at the Doctoral Consortium on our “Dynamic Contracting for PES Programs” paper
  • [September 2023] : Our extended abstract, “Quantifying the Effect of Interference on Platform Decisions,” was accepted at “CODE@MIT” !
  • [June 2023]: Excited to TA the “Mathematics and Computer Science of Market Design” summer graduate school at MSRI!

Research Interests

Most of my research interests lie in using tools from applied probability, algorithms, and statistical theory to study questions at the intersection of market design and data science. In one direction, I am interested in the use of data science tools to design economic mechanisms, and the resulting sample complexity and efficiency guarantees. In another direction, I am interested in the incentives of economic agents involved in statistical tests, and how they can result in biased estimates as well as undesirable market outcomes. From a methodological standpoint I am also interested in simplicity and robustness as tools for mechanism design. I am especially excited when the questions I’m studying have applications to operations and resource allocation in online platforms, the environment, and the public sector. Right now, I have worked on two projects:

  • Simplicity and Robustness in Contract Design for Sustainability: In this project, we study dynamic contract models motivated by Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs, where governments and NGOs pay landowners to maintain their land sustainably. We design dynamic contracts with simple payment structure that can achieve constant factor approximations of the optimal contract payoff. This tradeoff on simplicity vs. robustness is especially salient in developing world settings where contracts need to be simple enough for the participating agents to understand while still achieving a good outcome with respect to the optimal payment structure.
  • Bias from Experimentation in Online Platforms: We study the problem of A/B testing run by a two-sided online marketplace, and we focus on characterizing bias that results from estimating the variance of the estimated treatment effect. This allows us to quantify the effect of interference on the platform’s decisions to launch features. This work has been done in collaboration with research scientists at Airbnb.

Outreach and Organizing

At Stanford, I have served as a mentor for the MS&E department’s Undergraduate Diversity in Research program, as well as a board member and mentor for Stanford Women in Math Mentoring. I am also involved with EAAMO Bridges (formerly Mechanism Design for Social Good), where I am a co-organizer for the working group on environmental applications.

At Columbia, I was Vice President Internal of the Society of Women Engineers, where I coordinated many of our outreach events, including the Engineering Exploration Experience . I also provided math tutoring to elementary and middle school students around Harlem and Morningside Heights through Columbia’s One-to-One Tutoring community impact program.