The ACM SIGecom Test of Time Award recognizes influential papers published between 10 and 25 years ago that have had a lasting impact on research and applications at the intersection of economics and computation (EC).

Sandholm co-authored the paper with Mohammad Hajiaghayi, who was a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon at the time, and Robert Kleinberg, professor of computer science at Cornell University. The research combined automated mechanism design (an approach to designing rules of interactions introduced by Vincent Conitzer and Sandholm in 2002) with techniques from optimal stopping theory to develop online auction mechanisms that can make near-optimal decisions under uncertainty. The work also established fundamental limits on auction performance when information about market size is unavailable and introduced new prophet inequalities motivated by auction design.

The award was presented jointly to two research papers. The other winner is the paper "Adaptive limited-supply online auctions" by Kleinberg, Hajiaghayi and David Parkes. 

The award citation praised the researchers "for their pioneering contributions connecting optimal stopping theory — most notably prophet inequalities — to the design of online auction and pricing mechanisms under uncertainty. Together, these papers forged a vital bridge across the EC, AI, and theoretical computer science communities. By elegantly uniting mathematics with economic theory, they established a foundation that has profoundly shaped algorithmic economics over the past two decades."

Winners are invited to present retrospective talks on the impact of their work at the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, which will be held in Rome in July. 

For more information, visit the ACM SIGecom website.

Media Inquiries: 
Aaron Aupperlee, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, School of Computer Science