The year in market design

Kidney exchange:
In fits and starts, kidney exchange is picking up. The biggest development this year has followed from Mike Rees' pioneering Non-Simultaneous Extended Altruistic Donor Chain.

Here's an end of year news story by Amy Nutt at the NJ Star Ledger which goes over some of the progress made this year, by a growing number of kidney exchange programs: Kidney donation chains provide life-saving chances for patients.

Ms. Nutt has been reporting on New Jersey area kidney exchange for a while; here are some of her previous stories.
Part 1: A gift of hope unfolds
Part 2: A dozen surgeries in 36 hours
Part 3: Donors and recipients meet
Kidney donations connect strangers in 'Chain of Life' forged by transplants

Kidney exchange got going in New Zealand and Australia.

School choice:
Some new theory and evidence from the design of the New York City high school match, and new design efforts in some American and European cities.

Labor markets
The job market for new economists, which is up and running as we speak, gave us a glimpse of some data on how it is working.

Auctions:
My Market Design colleagues have expanded into the rough diamond business.
Noam Nissan (in his review of the decade in algorithmic game theory) writes
"The second half of the decade saw much of the focus shift to “ad auctions” of various kinds, an application that obviously wins the “killer AGT application of the decade” award (rather than the spectrum auctions which seemed the candidate in the beginning of the decade). While the driver of ad auction research is certainly the internet advertising multi-billion dollar industry that has hired droves of AGT researchers, much of this work seems to focus on issues that are of basic theoretical interest in settings of repeated auctions, often departing from the basic models of dominant-strategy worst-case analysis, vying for more delicate models that capture the desired issues better (and in so also influencing the rest of algorithmic mechanism design.)

Electricity
Operating electricity markets made progress around the world.