Market Design

本研究将采用理论与实验相结合的方法来研究市场设计。项目的理论部分旨在将多物品拍卖理论，特别是一揽子拍卖理论与匹配理论相结合，以开发实际手段来解决比当前机制所允许的更难的资源分配问题。在打包拍卖中，参与者竞标由多个物品组成的捆绑包。例如，伦敦市使用一揽子拍卖来选择巴士公司，以提供巴士路线的组合服务。智力价值：拍卖理论和匹配理论都有很长的智力历史，可以追溯到20世纪60年代初。威廉·维克里（William Vickrey）在拍卖理论方面的开创性贡献，以及盖尔和沙普利（Gale和Shapley）在匹配理论方面的开创性贡献，为当前的思想奠定了许多基础。近年来，Gale-Shapley算法已经作为几个备受瞩目的应用的基础，包括医生与医院住院医师项目的匹配，以及纽约和波士顿的儿童学校的分配，但对异质商品的广义维克里拍卖似乎从未被应用过。它的失败源于拍卖的某些限制，尤其是它可能产生非常低的收入，以及它不受报告价值的操纵，而是被可能有动机的买者、联盟和卖者剥夺了一些买家的资格。该理论将发展出另一种设计，在尽可能多地保持维克里拍卖的理想特征的同时，确保足够的收入和对其他已知操纵的免疫力。实验将测试相关动力机制的实用性，据报道，这些机制已在某些实验室环境中获得了巨大成功，但尚未进行系统分析。更广泛的影响：在许多高价值环境中，与传统设计相比，采用打包投标的拍卖有可能显著改善资源分配，增加收入。在资产出售的背景下，打包拍卖具有吸引对大型或小型打包感兴趣的竞标者投标的优势，当每组竞标者都很小，单独的任何一个都不足以产生足够有竞争力的价格时，这是一个特别重要的优势。在这种情况下，理论和实验都表明，这些拍卖可以达到传统拍卖无法达到的效率。

This research will study market design by a combination of theoretical and experimental approaches. The theoretical portion of the project aims to integrate multi-item auction theory, particularly the theory of package auctions, with matching theory to develop practical means to solve harder resource allocation problems than is allowed by current mechanisms. In package auctions, participants bid for bundles consisting of multiple items. For example, the city of London uses a package auction to select bus companies to service combinations of bus routes. Intellectual Merit: Auction theory and matching theory both have a long intellectual history dating to the early 1960s. Seminal contributions by William Vickrey in auction theory and by Gale and Shapley in matching theory laid much of the foundations for current thinking. The Gale-Shapley algorithm has served as a basis for several high-profile applications in recent years, including the match of doctors to hospital residency programs and the assignment of children to schools in New York and Boston, but the generalized Vickrey auction for heterogeneous goods appears never to have been applied. Its failure arises from certain limitations of the auction, especially its potential to yield very low revenues and its manipulability not to reported values but to shill bidders, coalitions, and sellers who may have an incentive disqualify some buyers. The theory will develop alternative designs that maintain as many of the desirable features of Vickrey auctions as possible while ensuring adequate revenues and immunity to the other identified manipulations. The experiments will test the practicality of related dynamic mechanisms, which are reported to have been used with great success in certain laboratory settings but which have not been systematically analyzed. Broader Impacts: Auctions with package bidding have the potential to result in dramatic improvements in resource allocations and increases in revenues compared to traditional designs in many high-value settings. In the context of asset sales, package auctions have the advantage of attracting bids by bidders interested in either large or small packages, which is an especially important advantage when each set of bidders is small and neither alone would be enough to generate sufficiently competitive prices. In these settings, theory and experiment both indicate that these auctions can achieve efficiency when more traditional kinds of auctions cannot.