Institutional Design and Market Engineering

本提案概述了一种调查市场机构的方法，该方法使用了由首席研究员开发的极具影响力的实验方法的扩展。他过去的研究成果帮助定义了实验经济学领域，并对我们理解市场设计和结构做出了重大贡献。目前的提案寻求资金，将这项工作扩展到DRMS项目的核心利益领域，包括现实世界中有关定价和供应的决策，以及关于激励结构变化对制度行为的影响的决策。这些扩展很可能意义重大，一方面是因为它们代表了传统上对经济理论感兴趣的研究人员对行为问题的敏感性，另一方面是因为它们有望扩展我们对一类重要机构的知识，这些机构将分散决策与集中优化模型相结合。该项目应通过关注使用创新拍卖机制的机构和交换结构的设计，从而产生新的理论见解，并通过将实验室环境中获得的市场知识扩展到天然气定价和公用事业网络的实际案例研究，从而产生新的应用见解。

This proposal outlines an approach for investigating market institutions using an extension of the highly influential experimental methods developed by the principal investigator. His past results have helped to define the field of experimental economics and have substantially contributed to our understanding of market design and structure. The current proposal seeks funding to extend this work into areas of central interest to the DRMS program, including decisions about pricing and supply made by real-world concerns and decisions about the effects of changes in incentive structures on institutional behavior. These extensions are likely to be significant, both because they represent a sensitivity to behavioral concerns on the part of researchers traditionally interested in economic theory and because they promise to extend our knowledge of an important class of institutions that combine decentralized decision making with centralized optimization models. The project should lead to new theoretical insights, by focusing on the design of institutions and exchange structures using innovative auction mechanisms, and it should lead to new applied insights, by extending knowledge of markets derived in laboratory settings to real-world case studies of natural gas pricing and utility networks.