Univ. Prof. Dr. Martin Bichler E-Mail: bichler at in.tum.de (S/MIME Certificate, RGB-CA)     Phone: +49 (0) 89 289 - 17500     Fax: +49 (0) 89 289 - 17535     Office: Room 01.10.061 Boltzmannstr 3 85748 Munich, Germany     Hours: by arrangement

ACM SIGACT Review 2020

Short Bio

Martin Bichler received his MSc degree from the Technical University of Vienna, and his Ph. D. as well as his Habilitation from the Vienna University of Economics and Business. He was working as a research fellow at UC Berkeley, and as research staff member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York. Since 2003 he is full Professor at the Department of Informatics of the Technical University of Munich (TUM), and also a faculty member at the TUM School of Management. He was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge (2008), at HP Labs Palo Alto (2008), Department of Economics at Yale University (2016), Department of Economics at Stanford University (2017). Martin is responsible for the Master's program in Information Systems at TUM and a faculty and board member of the Bavarian Elite Master program "Finance and Information Management".

He received the EURO Excellence in Practice Award, the INFORMS Daniel H. Wagner prize (runner-up), the HP Labs eAward, the IBM Faculty Award, the INFORMS ISS Design Science Award (twice), and he won the Siemens SCM Olympics. In 2019, he won one of the prestigious DFG Koselleck projects by the German National Science Foundation. In 2020 Martin war ranked in the top 0.5% out of 3346 scholars in the management sciences in Europe (5-year ranking) and in the top 1% in the lifetime ranking by the Wirtschaftswoche magazin. In 2018 Martin was ranked 3rd in publications overall in the 5-year ranking by the Wirtschaftswoche in the same ranking.

Martin is president of the INFORMS Section on Auctions and Market Design, past editor-in-chief of the BISE journal, and a fellow of the Agora Group on Market Design at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He is also a principal investigator of the DFG-funded research training group AdONE, which is at the intersection of Computer Science, Management Science, and Mathematics.

He is currently the Associate Dean at the Department of Informatics of the TU Munich, and Advisory Board member of the TUM Institute for Advanced Study, and a member of the collaboration board between TUM and SAP.

Vita and Publications

Research (Details)

Martin has contributed to different areas in computer science, operations research, and information systems. In particular he is interested in market design, optimization and resource allocation for cloud computing providers, econometrics, and data analysis. Martin has published in journals such as Nature (Machine Intelligence), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Operations Research, Management Science, INFORMS ISR, Production and Operations Management (POM), Games and Economic Behavior, ACM TEAC, IEEE TCC, IEEE TSC, International Journal of Industrial Organization, Energy Economics, Experimental Economics, EJOR, Naval Research Logistics, Economics Letters, OR Letters, Telecom Policy, IEEE Computer, CACM, Computer Networks, Distributed and Parallel Databases, and SIGMOD Records and is on the editorial board of a number or journals. In recent research Martin's group developed  

• a bilevel programming method to compute core-stable outcomes on exchanges where buyers have budget constraints.
• a method to learn Bayes Nash equilibria in auction games based on Neural Networks and Monte Carlo sampling. 
• a game-theoretical model showing that auctions might not exhibit efficient equilibria if we assume principal-agent relationships among bidding firms.
• strategies to game the wide-spread combinatorial clock auction.
• randomized approximation mechanisms which are truthful in expectation for specific applications in logictics.
• integer programming techniques for very high-dimensional bin-packing problems (as in cloud computing).
• algorithms to compute prices on non-convex markets (relevant to energy-markets, procurement, or environmental markets).

Research Transfer

He has been involved in the development of several software packages, which have been or are being used in industry practice. He has also been a consultant to policy makers and industry in different areas in the recent years:

• Policy advice on electricity market design in the context of the Kopernikus projects. 
• Game-theoretical consulting on spectrum auctions for bidders and regulators in almost a dozen auctions in countries such as Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, and Germany. Academic work has influenced decisions by the Australian regulator, the Canadian regulator, and the US Federal Communications Commission. He is co-editing the Handbook of Spectrum Auction Design with Cambridge University Press.
• Design of environmental markets Implementation of a large scale combinatorial exchange for the trading of catch shares in Australia in 2017. The project won the EURO Excellence in Practice Award 2018.
• Design of procurement auctions with industry partners such for direct and indirect materials. One of his projects won the Siemens SCM Olympics.
• Development of algorithms and tools for server consolidation and resource allocation in virtualized data centers with a European IT service provider. Implementation of control algorithms for virtualized data centers of a multi-national Asian IT service provider.
• Earlier contributions to open-source software projects such as the Prova rule engine or the Permoto performance modeling tool.

Recent Press Coverage

• Commentary on the sale of airport time slots together with Cramton, Gritzmann, and Ockenfels in the FAZ (December 20, 2020) and in VoxEU (January 15, 2021).
• Commentary on the German spectrum auction in 2019 in Wirtschaftswoche (April 18, 2019). 

Recent Books

• M. Bichler and J. Goeree. Handbook of Spectrum Auction Design, Cambridge University Press, 2017.
• M. Bichler. Market Design: A Linear Programming Approach to Auctions and Matching, Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Selected Academic Activities

• PRESIDENT, Auction and Market Design Section, INFORMS (2020-2021)
• EDITOR IN CHIEF, Business and Information Systems Engineering, Springer (2012-2019) 
• ASSOCIATE EDITOR, INFORMS Information Systems Research (2017-now)
• ASSOCIATE EDITOR, INFORMS Journal on Computing (2019-2022)
• ASSOCIATE EDITOR, Naval Research Logistics (2019-2022) 
• EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE of the IEEE Technical Committee on Business Informatics (2017-2020)
• SENIOR PC MEMBER, ACM Conference on Economics and Computation 2016, 2019.
• FELLOW of the Agora Market Design Center, UNSW, Australia
• ADVISORY COUNCIL of the TUM Institute for Advanced Study
• BOARD MEMBER of the Bavarian Elite Master program “Finance and Information Management”
• Head of finance and member of the strategy group of the Department of Informatics

Teaching

Martin Bichler is responsible for the Master program in Information Systems at TU München. He is also a board member of the ENB MSc Finance and Information Management. For a complete list of all offered courses, see the Teaching page. Martin received the TeachInf Award of the student union of the Department of Informatics five times for different courses.

• Operations Research (5 ECTS)
• Business Analytics and Machine Learning (5 ECTS)
• Auction Theory and Market Design (5 ECTS)

Working Papers

Recent Journal Publications

Community Service

• WORKSHOP COCHAIR, INFORMS Market Design Workshop, Budapest, Hungary, 2021.
• CLUSTER CHAIR, INFORMS Annual Meeting, Washington DC, USA, 2020, 2021.
• ASSOCIATE EDITOR, International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), India, 2020.
• SENIOR PROGRAM COMMITTEE MEMBER, ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, Phoenix, USA, 2019.
• CO-CHAIR, Workshop on Information Technology and Systems, Munich, 2019.
• CO-CHAIR, Doctoral Consortium, International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), Munich, Germany, 2019.
• PC MEMBER, ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, Ithaca, NY, 2018.
• FACULTY MENTOR, Doctoral Consortium, International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), San Francisclo, USA, 2018.
• TRACK CHAIR, International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), Seoul, Korea, 2017.
• SENIOR PROGRAM COMMITTEE MEMBER, ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, Netherlands, 2016.
• STREAM CHAIR,  International Conference on Operations Research, Aachen, Germany, 2014.
• TRACK CHAIR, International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), Milan, Italy, 2013.
• FACULTY MENTOR, Doctoral Consortium, International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), Milan, Italy, 2013.
• PROGRAM COMMITTEE CHAIR, International Conference on Electronic Commerce (ICEC), Singapore, 2012.
• CLUSTER CHAIR, for the Auction Cluster of the INFORMS Annual Meeting, Charlotte, NC, USA, 2011.
• ORGANIZING COMMITTEE, ICSE 2009 Workshop on Cloud Computing, Vancouver, BC, Canada, May 23, 2009.
• ORGANIZING COMMITTEE, MKWI 2008, Munich, Germany, February 26-28, 2008.
• PROGRAM COMMITTEE CHAIR, IEEE Conference on Service-Oriented Computing and Applications, Irvine, USA, June 19-20, 2007.
• TRACK CHAIR, eServices: Applications, Service Management and Technologies, Wirtschaftsinformatik 2007, Karlsruhe, Germany, February 2007.
• ORGANIZING COMMITTEE, „Service-oriented E-Commerce”, Multikonferenz Wirtschaftsinformatik (MKWI 2006), Passau, Germany, 20.-22.03.2006.
• GENERAL CHAIR, IEEE Conference on E-Commerce (CEC 2005), Munich, Germany, July 2005.
• PROGRAM COMMITTEE CHAIR, IEEE Conference on E-Commerce (CEC 2004), San Diego, USA, July 2004.
• PROGRAM COMMITTEE CHAIR, DEXA E-Commerce and Web Technologies (ecWeb 2004), Zaragoza, Spain, Sept. 2004.
• ORGANIZING COMMITTEE, „Coordination in Supply Networks" Track, Multikonferenz Wirtschaftsinformatik (MKWI 2004), Duisburg, Germany, 9.-11.03.2004.
• ORGANIZING COMMITTEE, IEEE Conference on Electronic Commerce (CEC 2003), Newport Beach, CA, USA, June 26-28, 2003.
• ORGANIZING COMMITTEE, Fourth International Symposium on Multimedia Software Engineering (MSE2004), Miami, FL, USA, Dec. 2004
• ORGANIZING COMMITTEE/PROGRAM COMMITTEE CHAIR, 4th IEEE International Workshop on Advanced Issues of E-Commerce and Web-based Information Systems (WECWIS 02), Newport Beach, CA, USA, June 26-28, 2002.
• ORGANIZING COMMITTEE, IBM Research Workshop on Dynamic Pricing in eBusiness, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA, July 16-17, 2001.
• ORGANIZING COMMITTEE, ECIS 2000, Vienna, Austria, July 3-5, 2000.
• Workshop CHAIR, CaiSE*00 Workshop on Infrastructures for Dynamic Business-to-Business Service Outsourcing (IDSO’00), June 6, 2000, Stockholm, Sweden.
• WORKSHOP CHAIR, International Workshop on Component-based Electronic Commerce, Berkeley, California, USA, July 25, 1998.