CDS Assistant Professor Kira Goldner Receives NSF CAREER Award
In an increasingly complex world, access to essential resources—whether healthcare, public housing, or financial aid—is often determined not just by need but by the ability to navigate bureaucratic obstacles, such as waiting in long lines, filling out extensive paperwork, or meeting rigid qualification criteria. These barriers often create inefficiencies and inequities, leaving many individuals struggling to access what they need.
Kira Goldner’s research on Multidimensional Utility Maximization when Ordeals are Payments aims to do just that. Her research rethinks existing systems by developing rigorous, data-driven methods to handle incentives and allocate resources efficiently. This focus recently earned the Boston University Shibulal Family Career Development Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences (CDS) the prestigious NSF CAREER Award for her groundbreaking work in the field.
The CAREER Awards support the early career development of junior faculty members likely to become academic leaders. The awards recognize faculty members who have the potential to serve as role models in research and education, lead advances in their department or organization, support the nation's science, mathematics, and engineering capabilities, and promote their use to serve society.
“I'm positive that this research direction will be as technically challenging and interesting as mechanism design for traditionally well-studied objectives like revenue maximization has been, spurring a decade or more of foundational innovation from the community,” Goldner said. “This is why I've been so dedicated toward sharing these ideas, and I'm very excited to see the community latch onto them.”
Goldner’s award not only advances her research but also cultivates a growing academic community focused on these critical issues. Her initiatives include workshops, mentoring programs, and educational materials designed to build a research network dedicated to utility maximization and social good. Recently, Goldner founded and is director of the Boston Economics and Computing Hub (BEACH), which unites researchers in this field across the Boston area, and through which she organizes local workshops.
“The overall arc of Kira’s research is aligned with the strategic focus of CDS on Civic Data Science, including the conception of sociotechnical systems and solutions that operate in the public interest within legal, economic, and policy frameworks,” said CDS Associate Provost Azer Bestavros. “Central to this vision is the introduction, deployment, and adoption of mechanisms focused on provisioning of social services as opposed to the more corporate revenue maximization mechanisms.”
The Hidden Costs of Access
Goldner’s research builds on her pioneering work in efficient allocation of goods and resources that cannot be assigned monetary values, a challenge that arises in many societally relevant settings. The challenge of balancing maximal value allocations and minimal payments becomes even greater when multiple types of resources, such as medical treatments, housing, or digital services, need to be allocated in a way that considers both consumer utility and broader societal constraints.
Addressing these challenges, Goldner’s research explores how non-monetary costs shape access to crucial resources. Emergency rooms, for example, often operate without pricing at the point of care, so patients “pay” in wait time. Triage systems prioritize the most urgent cases, but those with non-life-threatening issues may wait hours for treatment, which can disincentivize people from seeking care at all. Similarly, platforms like Lyft have introduced a “Wait & Save” feature that allows users to opt for a longer wait in exchange for a lower fare—demonstrating how time is commodified as a substitute for money.
While these systems may optimize efficiency or conserve resources, they often shift the burden onto individuals, particularly those who are already time-poor, physically vulnerable, or have fewer alternatives. Goldner’s research shows that such “ordeals” can introduce inefficiencies and inequities that outweigh their intended benefits. Her work builds mathematical models that help decision-makers weigh the cost of imposing such frictions against the social value of more equitable access. In doing so, she offers a new framework for designing resource allocation systems—whether in healthcare, transportation, or public assistance—that incorporate both the societal utility of allocating resources to the right individuals and the hidden costs imposed on those navigating the system.
“This research agenda has been a long time coming,” Goldner reflects. “The math behind revenue maximization fascinated me, but I wanted to work on topics that had a tangible societal benefit.”
A Research Journey Rooted in Societal Impact
Goldner’s interest in this field dates back to her doctoral studies when she explored revenue maximization but sought applications beyond corporate profit models. The inspiration for her current research first emerged in 2017 when she and her PhD advisor, Anna Karlin, began discussing how mechanism design could be applied to social service allocations, inspired by a paper by Mark Braverman on allocating healthcare services to patients where wait times serve as payments. This turned into a discussion about multidimensional utility maximization.
In 2019, Kira then met a master's student, Taylor Lundy, who had just written a paper on distributing resources to food banks using similar mathematical ideas. Goldner and Lundy met again four years later at a workshop and returned to the topic, leading to one of Goldner’s most significant contributions, and one that Goldner is most proud of. In their work, they explore a simpler way to balance competing needs when distributing resources efficiently without money.
To further engage the research community, she began giving talks about the direction in Summer 2023 and co-organized an online reading group with Sam Taggart in Fall 2023, open to researchers beyond BU, creating a space for deeper discussions on the complexities of optimizing non-monetary costs in resource allocation. View the paper here and the reading group site here.
“In particular, we have no general theory for how to do this when there is more than one type of good to be allocated, such as allocating different kinds of medical treatments or different kinds of public housing to those in need,” she explains. Goldner’s work is laying the foundation for a more structured approach to allocation challenges.
The Impact: Rethinking Access and Efficiency
Traditional market-based systems often fail to carefully consider access to essential services, leading to systemic inefficiencies. Healthcare policies, for instance, impose ordeal-based barriers such as step therapy, where patients must try and fail lower-cost treatments before gaining approval for more effective care. While intended to control costs, these mechanisms can prolong suffering and result in suboptimal health outcomes. Public housing systems rely on long waitlists and lotteries, while food assistance programs require extensive documentation, placing undue burdens on those most in need.
By applying optimization techniques and taking incentives into account, Goldner develops provable strategies to address real-world allocation challenges, such as designing more reasonable step-therapy policies in healthcare, reducing bureaucratic hurdles in food assistance programs, and optimizing emergency room wait times to ensure more efficient access to care.
A Future of Principled Mechanism Design
As Goldner embarks on this ambitious research journey, her NSF CAREER Award serves as a crucial stepping stone, providing the resources and platform necessary to advance this transformative research and broaden its impact on society. “Society will benefit from simple, explainable mechanisms with provable guarantees and guiding principles as to when to use which in practice,” Goldner explains. “I also aspire to collaborate with actual social service providers who use ordeals as payments,” referring to cases where access to resources is conditioned on non-monetary costs like wait times or administrative hurdles.
In recognition of her impact, she was named the 2021–22 Shibulal Family Career Development Professor in Computing & Data Sciences, an acknowledgment of her leadership and potential to drive meaningful change in the field. Her work stands as a testament to the power of data science in addressing fundamental societal challenges, paving the way for more inclusive and thoughtfully designed systems that serve the greater good.
By Neeza Singh (CDS'25)