Igor Cialenco
Illinois Institute of Technology, IL·Mathematics & Statistics
Groundwater is being pumped out faster than it refills in many drought-affected regions, and new institutions are forming to conserve it for future generations. One tool is a water market, where users buy and sell rights to pump groundwater.
- Fields
Mathematics & Statistics
Earth & Environmental Science
Social Science
- Topics
stochastic games
stochastic modeling
Nash equilibrium
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Develop a tractable top-down stochastic model of groundwater levels and use it to study how prices of tradeable groundwater rights form as a Nash equilibrium among competing water users.
- Characterize the Pareto optimal allocation of water rights and water banking strategy from a central planner's perspective, to measure how efficient and fair different management policies are.
- Develop scalable computational schemes to find market equilibria over many time periods with many stakeholders in groundwater markets.
More about the research
Designing such markets so they are efficient, fair and free of predatory behavior is a mathematical challenge, because water levels change unpredictably and many users act in their own interest.
Why it matters
Drought-affected regions are creating groundwater management institutions as aquifers are depleted. Tools for pricing and fairly allocating water rights could help regulators design water markets and policies that conserve groundwater, prevent exploitative trading and remain economically workable, supporting farmers, communities and other water users.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Simina Branzei
Purdue University, IN·Computer Science·Early-career
Analyze market dynamics in which computationally limited players with only local information interact over time, testing whether globally efficient allocations emerge and whether markets grow or shrink.
Asaf Cohen
University of Michigan, MI·Mathematics & Statistics
Rigorously connect the long-horizon behavior of finite-player stochastic games to their mean field game limits, identifying structural features that stay stable as the number of players grows.
Christian Kroer
Columbia University, NY·Computer Science·Early-career
Develop algorithms for online fair allocation and dynamic markets using online learning and first-order optimization methods, aiming for robustness across different input models rather than a single assumed arrival process.
The school
Illinois Institute of Technology: 5 labs on PI Pages, $38M a year on research, 76 research doctorates a year.
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