Robin Bowers

I’m a 5th year PhD student in the CS Theory group at the University of Colorado, Boulder. I’m co-advised by Dr. Bo Waggoner and Dr. Rafael Frongillo.

I am broadly interested in theoretical computer science, particularly algorithmic game theory and mechanism design. I’m currently interested in thinking about the value of information and designing algorithms with costly information discovery. I’m especially interested in socially impactful algorithms and fairness in mechanism design.

I helped found the CU Algorithmic Fairness Reading Group, and wrote a guide to organizing a reading group.

News

My paper Polynomial-Time Approximation Schemes via Utility Alignment: Unit-Demand Pricing and More with Marius Garbea, Manolis Pountourakis, and Sam Taggart was accepted to FOCS’25!

I co-organized the 2025 Gender Inclusion Workshop at EC at Stanford this year with Natalie Collina, Mirah Shi, and Kunhe Wang.

I earned my Master’s degree in December ‘24!

I attended the Winter School on Data Economics in Rabat, Morocco with my advisor Bo Waggoner as a TA in January ‘25!

I co-organized the EC Gender Inclusion Workshop at EC in New Haven this year with Yeganeh Alimohammadi, Natalie Collina, Kate Donahue, Bailey Flanigan, and Maneesha Papireddygari.

Working Papers

Prophet Inequalities for Bandits, Cabinets, and DAGs: Robin Bowers, Elias Lindgren, Bo Waggoner.

Publications

Polynomial-Time Approximation Schemes via Utility Alignment: Unit-Demand Pricing and More (FOCS'25, forthcoming): Robin Bowers, Marius Garbea, Emmanouil Pountourakis, Samuel Taggart.
Matching with Nested and Bundled Pandora Boxes (WINE '24): Robin Bowers, Bo Waggoner.
High Welfare Matching Markets via Descending Price (WINE '23): Robin Bowers, Bo Waggoner.
Loom Pedals: Retooling Jacquard Weaving for Improvisational Design Workflows (TEI '24): Shanel Wu, Xavier A Corr, Xi Gao, Sasha De Koninck, Robin Bowers, Laura Devendorf.
Machine Learning Based MIMO Equalizer for High Frequency (HF) Communications (IJCNN '20): S. Spillane, K. H. Jung, Bowers, T. Peken, M. H. Marefat and T. Bose.