Designing Efficient Market Mechanisms with Simplicity Requirements

本研究计划旨在探讨市场机制设计中的简单性概念。本研究的主要动机是观察到简单透明的机制更有可能在实践中使用，因为从参与者（即市场中的交易者）的角度来看，更容易理解机制的性质。此外，简单的机制往往易于实现，并且通常不需要花费时间来运行。“市场机制”一词指的是市场运行的平台和协议。市场是一个双边平台，买卖双方都是参与其中的代理人，两种代理人都遵循中介方制定的交易机制。提出的研究是理论性质的，但有实际应用的动机。其中一个主要的实际激励因素是电子商务的不断增加，以及在电子商务应用中需要透明和有效的市场机制。本提案所解决的挑战与一系列大规模应用相关，例如共享/访问经济（其中拼车平台和住宿平台是众所周知的例子，它们本质上是市场机制的应用程序）、在线市场和在线广告机制。在最近的微观经济理论和计算机科学的各种著作中，机制设计需要简单化。研究计划在一个抽象框架中捕获了市场平台，上面的应用领域可以投射到这个框架中。然后，它计划通过两个工作包来调查哪种市场机制可能保证哪些可取的特性，同时在经济上（即由此产生的社会福利应该很高）和计算上（即这种机制的运行时间应该很低）实现高性能。我们从这些机制中要求的属性是经济标准概念，即策略正确性、个人理性和预算平衡。此外，我们要求我们的机制“简单”，并将研究这一概念的适当形式化。这两个工作包从两个相反的方向检查问题：第一个工作包打算分析我们框架中最基本的情况，其中只有一个买方、一个卖方和一个项目。第二个工作包旨在为框架的日益普遍的实例设计机制（例如，考虑到许多买方和卖方，以及许多在买方和卖方之间对这些项目具有日益复杂和可能相互依赖的估值的项目）。

This research proposal aims to investigate the notion of simplicity in the design of market mechanisms. The main motivation for this study is the observation that simple and transparent mechanisms are more likely to be used in practice due to the ease of understanding the mechanism's properties from the point of view of the participants (i.e., traders in the market). Simple mechanisms moreover tend to be easy to implement, and generally are not time-consuming to run. The term "market mechanism" refers to the platform and protocols by which a market operates. A market is a two-sided platform, where both buyers and sellers are participating agents, and both types of agents follow a trading mechanism set out by an intermediating party. The proposed research is of a theoretical nature, yet is motivated by practical applications. One of the main practical motivators is the ever-rising presence of e-commerce, and the need for transparent and efficient market mechanisms in e-commerce applications. The challenges addressed in this proposal are relevant to a range of large-scale applications, such as those in the sharing/access economy (where ride-sharing platforms and lodging platforms form well-known examples; they are applications that function essentially as market mechanisms), online marketplaces, and online advertising mechanisms. The need for simplicity in mechanism design has furthermore been called for in various recent works in micro-economic theory and computer science.The research proposal captures market platforms in an abstract framework into which the above application domains can be cast. It then plans to investigate through two work packages which desirable properties can possibly be guaranteed by which market mechanisms, while achieving a high performance both economically (i.e., the resulting social welfare should be high) and computationally (i.e., the runtime of such a mechanism should be low). The properties we require from these mechanisms are the economically standard notions of strategy-proofness, individual rationality, and budget-balance. Furthermore, we require our mechanisms to be "simple" and will investigate suitable formalisations of this concept. The two work packages examine the problem into two opposing directions: The first work package intends to analyse the most atomic case within our framework, where only one buyer, one seller, and one item is present. The second work package aims to design mechanisms for increasingly more general instances of the framework (e.g., considering many buyers and sellers, and many items with increasingly complex and possibly interdependent valuations for these items among the buyers and sellers).