Cumulative Offer Processes

在过去十年中，经济理论家设计的几个程序已被用于解决高价值资源配置问题。其中包括许多国家的无线电频谱拍卖、电力销售、英国的碳减排，以及医生和心理学家的匹配过程。大多数新流程都是“累积报价流程”：在多轮流程中，报价要么保留在桌面上，要么可以保留在桌面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”）以及将拍卖用于列车调度的建议，在使用其他累积报价流程的实验室实验中取得了成功。本文提出的研究是对累积要约过程理论的详细探索。我期望得到几种结果。这些将包括(1)对市场情况的完整描述，在这种情况下，累积提供过程可以保证稳定的（“核心”）分配；(2)对过程的福利属性进行扩展分析，回答有关谁从哪种设计中受益最大的问题；(3)开发新的算法，这些算法在匹配市场（如新住院医生市场）方面具有高概率成功，在这种市场中，我们知道没有算法总是可以保证稳定的结果。(4)匹配市场理论与拍卖市场理论的统一；(5)在参与者对彼此的价值信息不足的情况下，对拍卖和匹配过程进行博弈论分析

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