Market Design

本研究将采用理论与实验相结合的方法对市场设计进行研究。该项目的理论部分旨在将多物品拍卖理论，特别是包拍卖理论与匹配理论相结合，以开发实用的方法来解决比现有机制所允许的更难的资源分配问题。在包裹拍卖中，参与者竞标由多个物品组成的捆绑包。例如，伦敦市使用套餐拍卖来选择公交公司来为公交路线组合提供服务。学术价值：拍卖理论和匹配理论都有悠久的学术历史，可以追溯到20世纪60年代初。威廉·维克里在拍卖理论中的开创性贡献，以及盖尔和沙普利在匹配理论中的开创性贡献，为当前的思想奠定了很大基础。近年来，盖尔-沙普利算法已经成为几个备受瞩目的应用的基础，包括医生与住院医生项目的匹配，以及将孩子分配到纽约和波士顿的学校，但针对不同商品的广义维克里拍卖似乎从未得到应用。它的失败是由于拍卖的某些局限性，特别是它产生的收入非常低的潜力，以及它的可操纵性不是为了报告价值，而是为了欺骗投标人、联盟和卖家，他们可能有动机取消一些买家的资格。这一理论将开发出替代设计，尽可能保持维克瑞拍卖的许多可取特征，同时确保足够的收入和对其他已确定的操纵行为的免疫力。这些实验将测试相关动态机制的实用性，据报道，这些机制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：与许多高价值环境中的传统设计相比，一揽子竞价拍卖有可能导致资源分配的显著改善和收入的增加。在出售资产的情况下，一揽子拍卖的优势是吸引对大包或小包感兴趣的投标人出价，这是一个特别重要的优势，因为每一组投标人都很小，两者都不足以产生足够有竞争力的价格。在这些背景下，理论和实验都表明，这些拍卖可以实现效率，而更多的传统拍卖类型无法实现。

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.