Shahar Dobzinski is a computer scientist and faculty member of the Weizmann Institute of Science in the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics. His general research interests are is algorithmic game theory, an area on the intersection of computer science, game theory, and economics. He usually studies the theory of computer science aspects of problems in algorithmic mechanism design. He is also interested in other related areas of theoretical computer science, such as approximation algorithms.

Shahar received his PhD from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem as part of the PhD program in the Rationality Center, His thesis “On the Power of Approximation in Algorithmic Mechanism Design” was written under the supervision of Prof. Noam Nisan. Shahar’s PhD research was aimed at bridging the gap between what is possible from a fame-theoretic perspective and that is possible from a computational point of view. His main research questions were: Is it possible to design truthful mechanisms that provide good approximations for combinatorial optimization problems?  How much additional burden do strategic constraints impose beyond the computational ones?

After completing his PhD in 2010, Shahar was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University, hosted by Prof. Bobby Kleinberg.