Akshit Kumar

Akshit Kumar

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Algorithms, Data, and Market Design at Yale University. I recently graduated from the Decision, Risk and Operations division at Columbia Business School, where I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Omar Besbes and Prof. Yash Kanoria. Prior to Columbia, I completed my Master's in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan, and before that I graduated with a B.Tech (Hons.) in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. I am broadly interested in the operations of online platforms and marketplaces, with a particular focus on AI agents and recommendation systems.

I am building ORdős Problems, a repository of open problems in Operations Research, Computer Science, Economics, and Applied Probability. Please check it out and consider contributing!

Feature-Based Dynamic Matching
Yilun Chen, Yash Kanoria, Akshit Kumar, Wenxin Zhang
Operations Research 74(2):788-803
EC 2023 | ACM Conference on Economics and Computation
ssrn| slides|poster|nick arnosti's blog post|

awards

Third Place, 2025 Michael H. Rothkopf Junior Research Paper Prize
First Place, 2024 Jeff McGill RMP Best Student Paper Prize

Dynamic Resource Allocation: Algorithmic Design Principles and Spectrum of Achievable Performances
Omar Besbes, Yash Kanoria, Akshit Kumar
Operations Research 73(3):1273-1288
EC 2022 | ACM Conference on Economics and Computation
arXiv|slides| poster | flash talk| EC talk |

awards

selected presentations

Second Place, 2024 Michael H. Rothkopf Junior Research Paper Prize
Finalist, 2023 INFORMS George Nicholson Student Paper Competition
Finalist, 2023 Jeff McGill RMP Best Student Paper Prize

WORDS | Workshop in Operations Research and Data Science, Duke Fuqua School of Business, 2024
Operations Rookiepalooza, Kellogg School of Management, 2024
Cornell Young Research Workshop, 2024
Management Science and Engineering (MS&E) Rising Stars Workshop, 2024
Fulfillment Optimization Research Series, Amazon, 2023

Feature-Based Dynamic Matching in the Dark
Akshit Kumar
Under Review
ssrn

How Much Should a Conversational Recommender System Converse?
Akshit Kumar, Vahideh Manshadi, Akhilesh Tumu
Journal Version Under Preparation
EC 2026 | ACM Conference on Economics and Computation
ssrn|

selected presentations

ESIF AI+ML 2026 | Econometric Society Interdisciplinary Frontier Economics and AI+ML Meeting
Big.AI MIT 2026 | Business Implications of Generative AI at MIT

selected presentations

2026 Michigan Ross Workshop on Unstructured Data and Language Models
ESIF AI+ML 2026 | Econometric Society Interdisciplinary Frontier Economics and AI+ML Meeting
WISE 2025 | Workshop on Information Systems and Economics
MIT CODE 2025 | Conference on Digital Experimentation at MIT

The Impact of Rankings and Personalized Recommendations in Marketplaces
Omar Besbes, Yash Kanoria, Akshit Kumar
Journal Version Under Preparation
EC 2025 | ACM Conference on Economics and Computation
arXiv|slides| poster|

selected presentations

MATCHUP 2026 | International Workshop on Matching Under Preferences

Performance of LLMs on Stochastic Modeling Operations Research Problems: From Theory to Practice
Akshit Kumar, Tianyi Peng, Yuhang Wu, Assaf Zeevi
WSC 2025 | Winter Simulation Conference
arXiv

selected presentations

RecSys'24: ACM Conference on Recommender Systems
Netflix ML Seminar

Breaking the Unit Throughput Barrier in Random Access Protocol Based Distributed Systems
Akshit Kumar, Parikshit Hegde, Rahul Vaze, Amira Alloum, Cédric Adjih
NCC 2023 | National Conference on Communications
ieee| arXiv

Low-cost aerial imaging for small holder farmers
Aditya Jain, Zerina Kapetanovic, Akshit Kumar, Vasuki Narasimha Swamy, Rohit Patil, Deepak Vasisht, Rahul Sharma, Manohar Swaminathan, Ranveer Chandra, Anirudh Badam, Gireeja Ranade, Sudipta Sinha, Akshay Uttama Nambi SN
COMPASS'19 | ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies

Best Paper Award

Speed scaling under QoS constraints with finite buffer
Parikshit Hegde, Akshit Kumar, Rahul Vaze
WiOpt'18 | International Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad hoc, and Wireless Networks