David Warsh on Auctions and Politics

David Warsh, the Boston-based economic journalist whose weekly internet column Economic Principals talks about economics and economists, writes about last week's NBER Market Design Working Group Meeting, which he attended.

Market design has blossomed in the last decade, in directions that would have been hard to predict. It has also made enormous progress in one of its oldest streams, auction design. This first NBER conference on market design had as its main theme the progress that has been made in auction design, by economists and computer scientists, since the first spectrum auctions in 1994. Warsh writes about that, and the political processes involved in persuading governments to adopt the new auction technologies (not to mention simply communicating them): Auctions and Politicians.