Cumulative Offer Processes

在过去的十年里，经济理论家们设计了几种方法来解决高价值的资源分配问题。这些措施包括在许多国家拍卖无线电频谱，在英国出售电力，减少碳排放，以及为医生和心理学家提供匹配程序。大多数新流程都是“累积要约流程”：多轮流程，要约要么留在谈判桌上，要么留在谈判桌上，而不影响机制的结果。最近提出的在美国和英国对无线电频谱进行“一揽子拍卖”(也称为“组合拍卖”)以及利用拍卖进行列车时刻表拍卖的提议，在使用其他累积报价过程的实验室试验中取得了成功。本文提出的研究是对累积要约过程理论的详细探索。我预计会得到几种结果。这些将包括(1)对市场情况的完整描述，在该市场情况中，累积报价过程可以保证稳定的(“核心”)分配，(2)对过程的福利属性的扩展分析，回答关于谁从哪种设计中受益最大的问题，(3)为匹配市场开发新的算法，其成功的概率很高，例如新的住院医师市场，其中我们知道没有算法可以总是保证稳定的结果，(4)匹配市场和拍卖市场的理论的统一，以及(5)当参与者对彼此的价值缺乏信息时，拍卖和匹配过程的博弈论分析

In the past decade, several procedures devised by economic theorists have been employed for high value resource allocation problems. These include auctions for radio spectrum in many countries, electrical power sales, and carbon emissions reductions in the UK, as well as matching processes for physicians and psychologists. Most of the new processes are "cumulative offer processes:" multi-round processes in which offers either remain on the table or could remain on the table without affecting the outcome of the mechanism. Recent proposals to conduct "package auctions" (also known as "combinatorial auctions") for radio spectrum in the US and UK and to use auctions for train scheduling have met with success in laboratory experiments using other cumulative offer processes. The research proposed here is a detailed exploration of the theory of cumulative offer processes. I anticipate obtaining several kinds of results. These will include (1) a complete characterization of the market situations in which cumulative offer processes can guarantee stable ("core") allocations, (2) an extended analysis of the welfare properties of the processes, answering questions about who benefits most from which design, (3) the development of new algorithms that succeed with high probability for matching markets like the market for new medical residents, in which we know that no algorithm can always guarantee a stable outcome, (4) a unification of the theories of matching markets and auction markets, and (5) a game theoretic analysis of auction and matching processes when the participants have poor information about one another's values