Yash Kanoria

I'm a Professor in the Decision, Risk and Operations division at Columbia Business School.

My research centers on the design and optimization of marketplaces including matching markets and online platforms.

I teach Business Analytics in the MBA core and an elective on Digital Marketplaces. I've taught the following research-oriented PhD classes:
Spring 2017: Engineering Online Matching Markets with Jay Sethuraman.
Fall 2019: Statistical Physics, Markets and Algorithms.
Fall 2021: Frontiers in Online Optimization.

You can reach me at ykanoria at-the-rate-of gmail POINT com. My office is Kravis 981.

Current PhD students: Jonathan Yi-An Tan, Matias Alvo, Allen Sirolly
Postdoc: Prakirt Jhunjhunwala
Past PhD students and postdocs: Akshit Kumar, Judy Gan, Jiaqi Lu, Pengyu Qian, Abhinav Sinha, Yilun Chen.

Awards: MSOM Young Scholar Prize Lanchester Prize, Sigecom Test of Time award (blog post, article, and listing), Amazon OR best paper award, IIT Bombay YAA award, NSF CAREER Award, ISIT student paper award

Here is my blog, where I also wrote about my sabbatical year at Amazon.

I'm a proud Indian American. I am unmarried. My two little nieces are my favorite people.

Journal papers:

• N. Immorlica, Y. Kanoria, and J. Lu, “When does competition and costly information acquisition lead to a deadlock?” WINE 2021, to appear in Operations Research. (talk video, interesting connection between market congestion and branching processes)

• Y. Chen, Y. Kanoria, Akshit Kumar, and Wenxin Zhang, “Feature-based Dynamic Matching,” EC 2023, Operations Research, 74(2):788-803, 2025.

• Y. Kanoria, “Dynamic Spatial Matching,” EC 2022, Annals of Applied Probability, 35(5), 2025. (talk video, my blog post)

• Y. Kanoria, S. Min, and P. Qian, “The Competition for Partners in Matching Markets” SODA 2021, Management Science, 71(6), 2025.

• Y. Kanoria and Pengyu Qian, “Blind Dynamic Resource Allocation in Closed Networks via Mirror Backpressure,” EC 2020, Management Science, 70 (8), 2024.

• Y. Kanoria, I. Lobel and Jiaqi Lu, “Managing Customer Churn Via Service Mode Control,” Math of OR, 49 (2), 2024.

• O. Besbes, Y. Kanoria, and Akshit Kumar, “Dynamic Resource Allocation: Algorithmic Design Principles and Spectrum of Achievable Performances,” EC 2022, Operations Research, 73(3), 2025.

• Y. Kanoria and D. Saban, “Facilitating the Search for Partners on Matching Platforms,” Management Science (Featured Article), 67(10), 2021 (also in EC 2017). (talk video, MS Blog post)

• I. Ashlagi, M. Braverman, Y. Kanoria and P. Shi, “Clearing matching markets efficiently: informative signals and match recommendations,” Management Science, 66(5), 2020 (also in EC 2017).

• I. Feigenbaum, Y. Kanoria, I. Lo and J. Sethuraman, “Dynamic Matching in School Choice: Efficient Seat Reallocation After Late Cancellations,” Management Science, 66(11), 2020.

• I. Ashlagi, Y. Kanoria and J. Leshno, “Unbalanced random matching markets: the stark effect of competition,” Journal of Political Economy, 125(1), 2017 (also in EC 2013). (talk video)

• R. Johari, V. Kamble and Y. Kanoria, “Matching while learning,” Operations Research, 69(2):655-681, 2021, also in EC 2017. (short talk by Vijay)

• Y. Kanoria and H. Nazerzadeh, “Incentive-compatible Learning of Reserve Prices for Repeated Auctions,” Operations Research, 69(2):509-524, 2021.

• Y. Kanoria, D. Saban and J. Sethuraman, “Convergence of the core in assignment markets,” Operations Research, 66(3):597-892, 2018 (also in SODA 2015).

• R. Anderson, I. Ashlagi, D. Gamarnik and Y. Kanoria, “Efficient dynamic barter exchange,” Operations Research, 65(6):1446-1459, 2017 (also in SODA 2015).

• N. Arnosti, R. Johari and Y. Kanoria, “Managing Congestion in Matching Markets,” Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, 23(3):620-636, 2021, also in EC 2014.

• S. Baswana, P. P. Chakrabarti, S. Chandran, Y. Kanoria and U. Patange, “Centralized admissions for engineering colleges in India,” INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics, 49(5), special issue for finalists for the Wagner Prize for Excellence in OR Practice 2018 (also in EC 2019). (Wagner finalist talk video)

• M. Bayati, C. Borgs, J. Chayes, Y. Kanoria and A. Montanari, “Bargaining dynamics in exchange networks,” Journal of Economic Theory, 156, 2015 (also in SODA 2011). (talk video)

• M. Ibrahimi, Y. Kanoria, M. Kraning and A. Montanari, “The Set of Solutions of Random XORSAT Formulae,” Annals of Applied Probability, Vol. 25, No. 5, 2015 (also in SODA 2012).

• Y. Kanoria and A. Montanari, “Majority dynamics on trees and the dynamic cavity method,” Annals of Applied Probability, Vol. 21, No. 5, 2011. (video of early results)

• Y. Kanoria and A. Montanari, “Optimal Coding for the Binary Deletion Channel With Small Deletion Probability,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Vol. 59, No. 10, 2013. Also in ISIT 2010, Student Paper award. (Blog post 1, Blog post 2)

• Y. Kanoria and O. Tamuz, “Tractable Bayesian Social Learning on Trees,” IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Vol. 31, No. 4, 2013. Also in ISIT 2012.

Working papers:

• A. N. Elmachtoub, Y. Kanoria, and J. Y. Tan, “Joint Service Depth and Priority Design in Queueing Systems,” ACM SIGMETRICS, 2027.

• A. Allouah, O. Besbes, J. D. Figueroa, Y. Kanoria, and A. Kumar, “What Is Your AI Agent Buying? Evaluation, Implications and Emerging Questions for Agentic E-Commerce”, WWW 2026 Short Paper.

• A. Sirolly, H. Ma, Y. Kanoria, and R. Sethi, “Network-Based Detection of Wash Trading”. (covered by Bloomberg, Coindesk, TheStreet, Decrypt, Gizmodo and others)

• O. Besbes, Y. Kanoria, and Akshit Kumar, “Impact of Rankings and Personalized Recommendations in Marketplaces,” appeared in EC 2025.

• A. Sirolly, H. Ma, and Y. Kanoria, “The Impact of Race-Blind and Test-Optional Admissions on Racial Diversity and Merit,” appeared in EC 2024, Major Revision in Management Science.

• O. Besbes, Y. Kanoria, and Akshit Kumar, “The Fault in Our Recommendations,” RecSys 2024. (my blog post)

• Y. Kanoria, J. Gan, and X. Zhang, “Local algorithms for dynamic optimization in networks,” Minor Revision in Stochastic Systems.

• S. Banerjee, Y. Kanoria and Pengyu Qian, “Dynamic Assignment Control of a Closed Queueing Network under Complete Resource Pooling,” appeared in SIGMETRICS 2018, Major Revision in Operations Research.

• Y. Lin, J. Gan, G. Qu, Y. Kanoria, and A. Wierman, “Decentralized Online Convex Optimization in Networked Systems, ” appeared in ICML 2022, submitted.

• Matias Alvo, Y. Kanoria, and D. Russo, “Neural Inventory Control in Networks via Hindsight Differentiable Policy Optimization, ” submitted.

• M. Alvo, Y. Kanoria, and D. Russo, “Policy Optimization in Hybrid Discrete-Continuous Action Spaces via Mixed Gradients.”

• M. Demirel, X. Hou, and Y. Kanoria, “Distance, Gender, and Access to Elite Higher Education: Evidence from India's Centralized Engineering Admissions.”

• Y. Kanoria, “The Generalized Excursion Coupling as the Limit of Concave Optimal Transport,” submitted.

• J. Dong, P. Jhunjhunwala, Y. Kanoria, “Right-Sizing Communication and Recommendation Set Size in AI-Assisted Search.”

• J. Dong, P. Jhunjhunwala, Y. Kanoria, “Optimal Congestion Signaling under Customer Heterogeneity and Demand Variation.”

Other conference papers:

• Y. Kanoria and H. Nazerzadeh, “Dynamic Reserve Prices for Repeated Auctions: Learning from Bids,” Web and Internet Economics (WINE), 2014.

• Y. Kanoria, A. Montanari, D. Tse and B. Zhang, “Distributed Storage for Intermittent Energy Sources: Control Design and Performance Limits,” Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, 2011.

• M. Ibrahimi, A. Javanmard, Y. Kanoria and A. Montanari, “Robust max-product belief propagation,” Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers, 2011 (Invited).

• Y. Kanoria and A. Montanari, “Subexponential convergence for information aggregation on regular trees,” (long version) IEEE Conf. on Decision and Control and European Control Conference (CDC-ECC), 2011.

• Y. Kanoria, “An FPTAS for Bargaining Networks with Unequal Bargaining Powers,” Workshop on Internet & Network Economics (WINE), 2010.

• Y. Kanoria, S. Mitra and A. Montanari, “Statistical Static Timing Analysis using Markov Chain Monte Carlo,” Design, Automation & Test in Europe (DATE), 2010.

• C. Dutta, Y. Kanoria, D. Manjunath and J. Radhakrishnan, “A Tight Lower Bound for Parity in Noisy Communication Networks,” ACM-SIAM Symp. on Discrete Alg. (SODA), 2008.

• Y. Kanoria and D. Manjunath, “On Distributed Computation in Noisy Random Planar Networks,” IEEE Intl. Symp. on Information Theory (ISIT), 2007.