Ramesh Johari's class on Platform and Marketplace Design, winter 2015

Here's a class by Ramesh Johari, well worth considering in the Winter quarter at Stanford:

MS&E 336: Platform and Marketplace Design The last decade has witnessed a meteoric rise in the number of online markets and platforms competing with traditional mechanisms of trade. Examples of such markets include online marketplaces for goods, such as eBay; online dating markets; markets for shared resources, such as Lyft, Uber, and Airbnb; and online labor markets. We will review recent research that aims to both understand and design such markets. Emphasis on mathematical modeling and methodology, with a view towards preparing Ph.D. students for research in this area. Prerequisites: Mathematical maturity; 300-level background in optimization and probability; prior exposure to game theory.

Mini course in market design: video of the short course (4 lectures) I gave in Brazil

Here is the link to lecture 1 of 4, with links to the other three lectures as well.

IWGTS 2014 - Mini-course: Market Design

These lectures were delivered as part of the  Conference on game theory in honor of Marilda Sotomayor: July 2014.

The price of freshman seminars ought to be going down...

According to this story in the Stanford Daily there are more freshman seminars this year, but no more applicants than last year.

"Though there was an overall increase in the number of Introductory Seminars (IntroSems) offered this year, the number of applications for and enrollments in fall quarter seminars stayed relatively the same as last year, according to Russell Berman, faculty director of the Stanford Introductory Seminars (SIS) program.

This year, 257 classes are available over the course of three quarters—more than the 221 classes offered last year—some of which are also eligible to fulfill the new Ways of Thinking/Ways of Doing breadth requirement.

Some fall quarter seminars attracted extraordinary application volume, making entry more difficult.

“These very popular courses sometimes create a problem for the program insofar as students apply for these and nine out of 10 are going to get turned down,” Berman said. “Sometimes students only apply to those courses that have strong enrollments, and then they get turned down multiple times.”

Berman noted several courses from all disciplines with competitive entries this quarter, including ME26N: Think Like A Designer, taught by Shilajeet Banerjee M.S. ‘00, associate professor of mechanical engineering at the d.school; Psychology Professor Carol Dweck’s PSYCH12N: Self Theories; and ECON26N: Who gets what? The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design, taught by Alvin Roth M.A. ‘73 Ph.D. ‘74, a professor of economics who won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.

The professors who had to review hundreds of applications to their popular classes developed their own acceptance policies. Roth specifically asked his prospective students to write about something they had experienced related to the course’s subject matter.

“I chose students who wrote about something interesting,” Roth said."

Study mechanism design online with Jason Hartline

Jason Hartline writes:

Please share the following announcement:

   *** Online Self-study on Mechanism Design and Approximation  ***

   Web: http://www.eecs.northwestern.edu/hartline/courses/mdna.html

   Discussion: https://piazza.com/northwestern/fall2013/eecs499/home

   To enroll: go to course page on Piazza and enroll as a student.

Synopsis. This course is a self-study course based on the manuscript "Mechanism Design and Approximation" which is based on a graduate course that has been developed at Northwestern over the past five years. Over the fall quarter we will work through roughly one chapter per week. The week will start with students reading and discussing the material of the chapter and it will conclude with students working together to solve and write up solutions to the chapter exercises.  The textbook is in final draft and your comments and suggestions will help improve the book for future students.

Excerpt from Chapter 1: Our world is an interconnected collection of economic and computational systems. Within such a system, individuals optimize their actions to achieve their own, perhaps selfish, goals; and the system combines these actions with its basic laws to produce an outcome. Some of these systems perform well, e.g., the national residency matching program which assigns medical students to residency programs in hospitals, e.g., auctions for online advertising on Internet search engines; and some of these systems perform poorly, e.g., financial markets during the 2008 meltdown, e.g., gridlocked transportation networks. The success and failure of these systems depends on the basic laws governing the system. Financial regulation can prevent disastrous market meltdowns, congestion protocols can prevent gridlock in transportation networks, and market and auction design can lead to mechanisms for allocating and exchanging goods or services that yield higher profits or increased value to society.

This text focuses on a combined computational and economic theory for the study and design of mechanisms. A central theme will be the tradeoff between optimality and other desirable properties such as simplicity, robustness, computational tractability, and practicality. This tradeoff will be quantified by a theory of approximation which measures the loss of performance of a simple, robust, and practical approximation mechanism in comparison to the complicated and delicate optimal mechanism. The theory provided does not necessarily suggest mechanisms that should be deployed in practice, instead, it pinpoints salient features of good mechanisms that should be a starting point for the practitioner.

My freshman seminar and Ph.D. class on matching: Fall 2013

ECON 26N: Who gets what? The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design

Freshman Seminar. What are markets and marketplaces? How do they work? How do they fail? How can we fix them when they¿re broken? Recently economists have become market designers to try to answer these questions. What are matching markets and why are they important? This seminar will explore examples of matching markets such as; who goes to which schools and universities? Who gets which jobs? Who gets scarce organs for transplant? Who marries whom? We'll investigate examples of recent market designs in school choice, labor markets and kidney exchange. How internet dating sites and social networking might make courtship very different for your generation than it was previous ones.

Terms: Aut | Units: 3 | UG Reqs: WAY-SI | Grading: Letter (ABCD/NP)

Instructors: Roth, A. (PI)

Schedule for ECON 26N

ECON 285: Matching and Market Design

This is an introduction to market design, intended mainly for second year PhD students in economics (but also open to other graduates students from around the university and to undergrads who have taken undergrad market design). It will emphasize the combined use of economic theory, experiments and empirical analysis to analyze and engineer market rules and institutions. In this first quarter we will pay particular attention to matching markets, which are those in which price doesn¿t do all of the work, and which include some kind of application or selection process. In recent years market designers have participated in the design and implementation of a number of marketplaces, and the course will emphasize the relation between theory and practice, for example in the design of labor market clearinghouses for American doctors, and school choice programs in a growing number of American cities (including New York and Boston), and the allocation of organs for transplantation. Various forms of market failure will also be discussed. Assignment: One final paper. The objective of the final paper is to study an existing market or an environment with a potential role for a market, describe the relevant market design questions, and evaluate how the current market design works and/or propose improvements on the current design.

Terms: Aut | Units: 2-5 | Grading: Letter or Credit/No Credit

Instructors: Niederle, M. (PI) ; Roth, A. (PI)

Schedule for ECON 285

Back in my old haunts

I'll be guest lecturing today in my old market design class at Harvard, as now taught by Peter Coles and Ben Edelman. I'll speak about kidney exchange.

Then I'll go to the NBER workshop on market design:

9:00 amWilliam Fuchs, University of California at Berkeley

Andrzej Skrzypacz, Stanford University
Costs and Benefits of Dynamic Trading in a Lemons Market

Jacob Leshno, Microsoft Research
Dynamic Matching in Overloaded Systems

10:35 am

Kenneth Hendricks, University of Wisconsin and NBER
Daniel Quint, University of WisconsinSelecting Bidders Via Non-Binding Bids When Entry Is Costly 

Sergiu Hart, Hebrew University
Noam Nisan, Hebrew UniversityThe Menu-Size Complexity of Auctions 

Yeon-Koo Che, Columbia University
Jinwoo Kim, Yonsei University
Fuhito Kojima, Stanford University
Efficient Assignment with Interdependent Values

1:30 pm

Itai Ashlagi, MIT
Alvin Roth, Stanford University and NBER
Kidney Exchange in Time and Space

Tayfun Sonmez, Boston College

M. Utku Unver, Boston College
Welfare Consequences of Transplant Organ Allocation Policies

3:20 pm

Peter Cramton, University of Maryland
Pacharasut Sujarittanonta, Cramton Associates LLC
Robert Wilson, Stanford University
Using an Auction to Dissolve a Partnership Efficiently

Lawrence Ausubel, University of Maryland
Jonathan Levin, Stanford University and NBER
Paul Milgrom, Stanford University
Ilya Segal, Stanford UniversityIncentive Auction Rules Option and Discussion

Saturday, October 20:

9:00 am

Aditya Bhave, University of Chicago
Eric Budish, University of ChicagoPrimary-Market Auctions for Event Tickets: Eliminating the Rents of "Bob the Broker" 

Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Duke University

Nikhil Agarwal, Harvard University

Parag Pathak, MIT and NBER

Centralized vs. Decentralized School Assignment: Evidence from NYC

10:40 am

Qingmin Liu, Columbia University
Marek Pycia, University of California at Los Angeles
Ordinal Efficiency, Fairness, and Incentives in Large Markets

Scott Duke Kominers, University of Chicago
Tayfun Sonmez, Boston College
Designing for Diversity in Matching

1:00 pm

Elisa Celis, University of Washington
Gregory Lewis, Harvard University and NBER
Markus Mobius, Iowa State University and NBER
Hamid Nazerzadeh, University of Southern California
Buy-it-Now or Take-a-Chance: Price Discrimination through Randomized Auctions

Michael Kearns, University of Pennsylvania
Mallesh Pai, University of Pennsylvania
Aaron Roth, University of Pennsylvania
Jonathan Ullman, Harvard University
Mechanism Design in Large Games: Incentives and Privacy

David Rothschild, Microsoft Research
David Pennock, Microsoft Research
The Extent of Price Misalignment in Prediction Markets

3:00 pm

Adjourn

Market design course at Stanford (Econ 285, Autumn 2012)

Muriel Niederle and I will be teaching an introduction to market design this quarter (the first quarter of a three quarter graduate sequence whose other quarters will be taught by Paul Milgrom and Fuhito Kojima).

The first class session is on Monday September 24.

This will be the first course I've taught at Stanford since 1978 (when I taught a course on Axiomatic Models of Bargaining, while on leave from the University of Illinois), and it will likely resemble the market design course I taught last Fall at Harvard. You can find the web page for that course, which includes the slides I lectured from here. (Since this will be followed by a quarter taught by Paul Milgrom, we plan to spend less time on auctions than when I taught at Harvard, and more time on matching markets: see the course description below.)

We think the class might be interesting not only to economists but also to operations researchers and computer scientists...

ECON  285 - 01   Market Design
				Stanford University | 2012-2013 Autumn | Lecture
		Return to Faculty Center
			Class Details Status Open Class Number 34287 Session Regular Academic Session Units 2 - 5 units Lecture Required Class Components Career Graduate Dates 9/24/2012 - 12/7/2012 Grading Letter or Credit/No Credit Location Stanford Main Campus Campus Stanford Main Campus
			Meeting Information Days & Times Room Instructor Meeting Dates MoWe 11:00AM - 12:50PM Econ 106 Alvin Roth, Muriel Niederle 09/24/2012 - 12/07/2012
			Class Availability Class Capacity Wait List Capacity 17 0 Enrollment Total Wait List Total 10 0 Available Seats 7
			Description This is an introduction to market design, intended mainly for second year PhD students in economics (but also open to other graduates students from around the university and to undergrads who have taken undergrad market design). It will emphasize the combined use of economic theory, experiments and empirical analysis to analyze and engineer market rules and institutions. In this first quarter we will pay particular attention to matching markets, which are those in which price doesn¿t do all of the work, and which include some kind of application or selection process. In recent years market designers have participated in the design and implementation of a number of marketplaces, and the course will emphasize the relation between theory and practice, for example in the design of labor market clearinghouses for American doctors, and school choice programs in a growing number of American cities (including New York and Boston), and the allocation of organs for transplantation.  Various forms of market failure will also be discussed. Assignment:  One final paper. The objective of the final paper is to study an existing market or an environment with a potential role for a market, describe the relevant market design questions, and evaluate how the current market design works and/or propose improvements on the current design.