Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Market design is coming of age

There are an increasing number of signs that Market Design is coming of age as a distinct area of economics. Here are three.

The National Bureau of Economic Research has formed a new Market Design Working Group. Susan Athey and Parag Pathak have organized its first conference, for May 15-16, 2009. Here is the preliminary program.

My Market Design course at Harvard, which for many years used to stand alone, is this year part of a two-semester sequence, with the second semester being Economics 2056b. Topics in Market Design - (New Course) offered by my colleagues Susan Athey and Greg Lewis. More of our Ph.D. students are choosing market design as a field, and we've had some great graduates in the decade I've been at Harvard (all of whom do other things as well:), including Estelle Cantillon, Muriel Niederle, John Asker, Michael Ostrovsky , Ben Edelman, Parag Pathak, Fuhito Kojima, Robin Lee and (this year) Eric Budish and Mihai Manea.

Oxford University Press is preparing a Handbook of Market Design, edited by Nir Vulcan, Muriel Niederle , and Zvika Neeman.

1 comment:

michael webster said...

You could do a world of good if you would write some more polemic pieces against "the free market" and point out that all markets or trading mechanisms have rules, some are good and some are bad.

Assign a graduate student to use google alerts for the phrase "the free market", publish your standard remarks on this blog, and send a copy of your post to the offender.

Gavin Kennedy, writing at http://www.adamsmithslostlegacy.com/ASLLBlog.htm uses this tactic for dealing with misuses of Adam Smith's words "invisible hand".