Auctions for Multiple Goods, and Understanding Consumer Preferences

2007年，为了应对北方岩银行挤兑--英国自19世纪以来的第一次银行挤兑--克伦佩雷尔发明了“产品组合拍卖”，以改善英格兰银行向银行、建筑协会等的资金分配（克伦佩雷尔，2008年，2010年）。英格兰银行的一位执行董事将其描述为“中央银行业务的世界第一”，“可能是支持金融稳定的实际政策的重要一步”（Milnes，2010）和州长默文·金（Mervyn King）告诉《经济学人》（The Economist）（10月19日，2012），“Klemperer拍卖[是]这是理论经济学在一个对金融市场至关重要的实际问题上的奇妙应用。拍卖通过同时分配不同的货物来提高效率--在这个例子中，是用不同的抵押品来支付资金。 该项目将进一步发展产品组合拍卖设计，使其成为更广泛背景下的实用工具。例如，拍卖的版本可以用于股票交易的批处理，以消除高频交易问题。他们也可能是实现英国的重要。的目标“开始拍卖电力供应合同。...到2020年代，跨技术。“我们将是世界上第一个实现这一目标的国家，”（英国）夸口说。内阁能源和气候变化部长]”（经济学人，2012年12月1日）。 为扩大拍卖的范围和灵活性所需开展的理论工作也将有助于阐明范围更广的问题。例如，我们的工作将更好地描述和理解商品不可分割时的消费者偏好，回答一些关于经济均衡存在的深层次问题，并应用于匹配理论。 我们将使用最近开发的“热带几何”和其他几何技术以及更标准的经济工具来更好地了解经济主体的偏好。我们将发展我们的“需求类型”理论，它提供了一个框架来检查和比较代理人的需求属性，并开发描述不同“类型”偏好的方法。 因此，该项目将有理论和实践产出：除了准备学术论文提交给领先的经济理论期刊，并在学术会议上发表，我们还将讨论我们的工作与潜在的用户我们的拍卖设计，并将开发我们的拍卖程序的软件实现，这将易于用于演示和实验目的，并提供一个平台，在这个平台上，问题-可以开发具体应用。

In 2007, responding to the Northern Rock bank run--Britain's first bank run since the 1800's-- Klemperer invented the "Product-Mix Auction", to improve the Bank of England's allocation of funds to banks, building societies, etc. (Klemperer, 2008, 2010). An Executive Director of the Bank of England described it as "a world first in central banking" and "potentially a major step forward in practical policies to support financial stability" (Milnes, 2010), and the Governor (Mervyn King) told The Economist (Oct. 19, 2012) that "Klemperer auctions [are] a marvellous application of theoretical economics to a practical problem of vital importance to financial markets". The auctions improve efficiency by simultaneously allocating distinct goods - in this example, funds against different collaterals. This project will further develop the Product-Mix Auction design to make it a practical tool in a broader range of contexts. For example, versions of the auction could be used for batch processing of stock trades to eliminate high-frequency trading problems. They could also be important in achieving the U.K.'s goal "to start auctioning electricity-supply contracts. ... by the 2020s,...across technologies. 'We would be the first country in the world to achieve that', boasts [the U.K. Cabinet Minister for Energy and Climate Change]" (The Economist, Dec. 1, 2012). The theoretical work required to extend the range and flexibility of the auction will also shed light on a much wider range of issues. For example, our work will develop a better characterisation and understanding of consumer preferences when goods are indivisible, yield answers to some deep problems about the existence of economic equilibrium, and have applications to matching theory. We will use recently-developed "tropical geometric", and other geometric, techniques as well as more standard economic tools to develop a better understanding of economic agents' preferences. We will develop our theory of "demand types" which provides a framework to check and compare the properties of agents' demands, and develop ways to depict preferences of different "types". The project will thus have both theoretical and practical outputs: in addition to preparing academic papers for submission to leading economic theory journals, and presenting at academic conferences, we will also discuss our work with potential users of our auction designs, and will develop software implementations of our auction procedures that will be easy to use for demonstration and experimentation purposes and provide a platform on which problem-specific applications can be developed.