Ferdowsi University of Mashhad

The proposal of the researchers of Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, entitled " Doing a Great job better: Designing a Market for Charity Donation", was selected as the best project in the international competition of "Global Challenges in Economics and Computer Science".

The Special Interest Group in Economics and Computing (SIGECOM) is one of the Special Interest Research Subgroups of the Association of Computing Systems (ACM), which generally encourages research between economics and computer science. The group also calls each year to support research on important new theoretical issues in economics and computer science with the support of emerging researchers and pilot research with broad social benefits. The call entitled Global Challenges in Economics and Computation was in an international competition with dozens of proposals submitted from various countries and universities. It had a $ 150,000 research fund, sponsored by Facebook, for researchers eager to use research in economics and computer science. To help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the proposed ideas will have a positive impact on one or more middle- or low-income countries.

Proposal submitted by two professors of Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Dr. Rasoul Ramezanian, and Dr. Mehdi Feizi, along with Prof. Bettina Klaus from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. In this proposal, they addressed the important issue that the effectiveness of altruism from an individual perspective does not necessarily mean that it is effective from a collective perspective and that inconsistencies between donors can inefficiently distribute aid to those in need. In this proposal, market design ideas have been used to solve this problem so that the final allocation is not only efficient but also fair. Based on the mechanism proposed in this proposal for the optimal allocation of charitable donations in the long run, Ferdowsi University researchers intend to study how to design a smart donation contract on the blockchain technology.

The advantage of this method is that there is basically no need for a third party to engage in the allocation, and the contract between the donors itself performs the allocation intelligently. In this way, the concern of corruption and money laundering, which is serious in charity, is eliminated.