Market design: some press accounts in Chile

 The recent market design workshop in Santiago was pretty thrilling, and I was asked to give some interviews and a public talk, which have now generated some press about market design.

Here's a post-talk story:

"Los mercados son artefactos humanos, son herramientas que construimos nosotros mismos para que nos ayuden" ["Markets are human artifacts, they are tools that we build ourselves to help us"]

Google translate does a good job, and the piece includes a video of my talk (starting at around minute 20:45 after a long wait between the start of live streaming and the actual start of the talk...). You can hear the talk in Spanish (only), the acute listener will notice that it's given in a woman's voice...)

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Another article also has some pictures of the audience, and as this was the last act of the market design workshop, readers of this blog may recognize some people in one of the photos.

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Some earlier stories were published after I was interviewed during the workshop also in Spanish, also accessible by G translate):

“An international collaboration in South America for kidney transplantation would be useful”

Alvin Roth and lack of equity in the Chilean economic system: “Attention should focus on alleviating and abolishing poverty”

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After the workshop we explored Chile's Atacama with some colleagues including Itai Ashlagi and Ravi Jagadeesan:

Public lecture today at the Casa Central de la Universidad de Chile:“Quién obtiene qué y por qué: La nueva economía del diseño de mercados”

 Alvin Roth, Premio Nobel de Economía, dictará charla magistral en Casa Central de la Universidad de Chile [Alvin Roth, Nobel Prize winner in Economics, will give a keynote talk at the Central House of the University of Chile]

“Who gets what and why: The new economics of market design” is the name of the talk that Alvin Roth, 2012 Nobel Prize winner in Economics, will give on Wednesday, December 20, at 12:00 p.m., in the Hall of Honor of the Central House of the University of Chile.

The activity is organized by the Millennium Institute for Research on Market Imperfections and Public Policies (MIPP), the Center for Mathematical Modeling (CMM) of the University of Chile and the Ring Project “Information and Computing in Market Design” and in it Roth will speak about his renowned book in which he explains about the frequent “matching” markets, in which money is not a determining factor.

The talk will be in English and will have simultaneous translation into Spanish. [La charla será en inglés y contará con traducción simultánea al español.]

The talk will be in the Salón de Honor de Casa Central, which sounds like it will be an impressive venue.

Market Design and Maintenance (new NBER working paper, from a conference)

This paper began as a presentation at the NBER conference on New Directions in Market Design, in the Spring of 2023

 Market Design and Maintenance by Alvin E. Roth.  NBER WORKING PAPER 31947

DOI 10.3386/w31947, ISSUE DATE December 2023

Abstract: Because no marketplace operates in isolation from the larger world, marketplace designs may need to adapt to changes in the larger environments. I discuss such changes in connection with the labor markets for new doctors, new Ph.D. economists, and for kidney exchange transplants. But while practical market design presents a host of challenges, it also offers many rewards. Among the rewards to market designers themselves is the opportunity to become intimately familiar with markets that shape the lives and careers of their participants.

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There will eventually be a conference volume published by U. Chicago Press, and some of the papers are already online, and slides and  videos from the conference are here.

Computers in Econ (and in market design)

 The current issue of the journal Œconomia. is devoted to The Computerization of Economics. Computers, Programming, and the Internet in the History of Economics

It includes this surprisingly grumpy-sounding take on market design, particularly on its intersection with game theory:

 Nik-Khah, Edward. "The Closed Market: Platform Design and the Computerization of Economics." Œconomia. History, Methodology, Philosophy 13-3 (2023): 877-905.

Here's a paragraph that caught my eye:

"In his book Who Gets What—And Why, the market designer Alvin Roth pronounced firms such as Google, Amazon, and Uber to be “markets,” proclaiming, “Successful designs depend greatly on the details of the market, including the culture and psychology of the participants” (Roth, 2015). One need not actually find an example of an economist counseling advisees to skip that additional course in game theory and take up cultural anthropology to arrive at the sense that matters had taken a surprising turn: only a decade before one regularly encountered brash claims that all social science worth its salt must be reducible to game theory, with market design cited as evidence for why this must be so (e.g., Binmore, 2004)."

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Here's the table of contents of the issue:

• The Computerization of Economics. Computers, Programming, and the Internet in the History of Economics

  edited by Marcel Boumans, Cléo Chassonnery-Zaïgouche, Pierrick Dechaux and Francesco Sergi
  • Marcel Boumans, Cléo Chassonnery-Zaïgouche, Pierrick Dechaux and Francesco Sergi
    The Computerization of Economics: Three Lessons for Economics [Full text]
    Introduction to the Special Issue
    L’informatisation des sciences économiques : trois leçons pour les sciences économiques
  • Laetitia Lenel
    The Introduction of the Electronic Computer and the End of Business Forecasting at the NBER [Full text]
    L’introduction de l’ordinateur électronique et la fin des prévisions économiques au NBER
  • Chung-Tang Cheng
    From Computors to Computers: The Early History of Econometric Computation at the University of Cambridge [Full text]
    Des calculateurs aux ordinateurs : à l’aube du calcul économétrique à l’université de Cambridge
  • Pedro G. Duarte and Francesco Sergi
    Computer Operators and Software Engineers at Data Resources Inc. [Full text]
    Opérateurs informatiques et ingénieurs logiciel chez Data Resources Inc.
  • Andrej Svorenčík
    The Role of Computers in the Emergence of Experimental Economics Laboratories: Material Culture and Moral Economy [Full text]
    Le rôle des ordinateurs dans l’essor des laboratoires d’économie expérimentale : culture matérielle et économie morale
  • Béatrice Cherrier, Aurélien Saïdi and Francesco Sergi
    “Write Your Model Almost as You Would on Paper and Dynare Will Take Care of the Rest!” A History of the Dynare Software [Full text]
    « Écrivez votre modèle comme sur papier et Dynare s’occupera du reste ! » Une histoire du logiciel Dynare
  • Julien Gradoz
    The Computer and the Statistician. Computerization and the Mobilization of Scanner Data by National Statistical Institutes for the Construction of Price Indexes [Full text]
    L’informatisation et la mobilisation des données de caisse par les instituts nationaux de statistiques dans la construction des indices de prix
  • Edward Nik-Khah
    The Closed Market: Platform Design and the Computerization of Economics [Full text]
    Le marché clos : la conception des plateformes et l’informatisation des sciences économiques

  • • Symposium on Elisabeth Popp Berman's “Thinking Like an Economist. How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy”

      • Cléo Chassonnery-Zaïgouche and Aurélien Goutsmedt
        Symposium on Elisabeth Popp Berman’s Thinking Like an Economist. How Efficiency Replace Equality in U.S. Public Policy [Full text]
      • Edward Nik-Khah
        RARG Against the Machine [Full text]
      • Thomas Kayzel
        Not Just the Economic Style: Technocratic Ideology and Neoliberalism in US Policymaking [Full text]
      • Diane Coyle
        Automating the Economic Style of Reasoning [Full text]
      • Giulio Zanella
        Shallow and Deep Economic Thinking [Full text]

Simple Proofs of Important Results in Market Design-- (video of my talk at Berkeley's Simons Institute)

Here's a video of the talk I gave on Friday at the Simons Institute, on simple proofs of important theorems about matching, that have had impact on practical market design.

Online and Matching-Based Market Design, Simons Institute, Berkeley. Oct. 26 – , Oct. 27,

 To celebrate the book of the same name, the Simons Institute is hosting a conference today and tomorrow on

Online and Matching-Based Market Design, Simons Institute, Berkeley.  Calvin Lab Auditorium, Thursday, Oct. 26 – Friday, Oct. 27, 2023

"All talks can also be viewed live on our YouTube channel, and recordings of each talk will also be available following each presentation unless otherwise noted. YouTube Live Stream: https://www.youtube.com/user/SimonsInstitute/live."

Thursday, Oct 26:

9:30 – 9:55 a.m.

Coffee and Check-in

9:55 – 10 a.m.

Opening Remarks

10 – 10:45 a.m.

Algorithmic Mechanism Design with Investment

Paul Milgrom (Stanford University)

10:45 – 11 a.m.

Break

11 – 11:30 a.m.

Endogenous Market Formation: Theory and Evidence from Chilean College Admissions

Soohyung Lee (Seoul National University)

11:30 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.

LP-Duality and the Cores of Games

Vijay V. Vazirani (UC Irvine)

12:15 – 1:30 p.m.

Lunch (on your own)

1:30 – 2 p.m.

Estimating Separable Matching Models

Bernard Salanié (Columbia University)

2 – 2:30 p.m.

Market Design for Priority-Based Assignment with Distributional Objectives

Atila Abdulkadiroglu (Duke University)

2:30 – 3 p.m.

Strict Core Stability and Strategy-Proofness for Hedonic Games with Friend-Oriented Preferences

Bettina Klaus (University of Lausanne)

3 – 3:15 p.m.

Break

3:15 – 3:45 p.m.

Revealed Preferences of One-Sided Matching

Andrew Tai (UC Berkeley)

3:45 – 4:15 p.m.

Stable Matching by Optimal Transport

Federico Echenique (UC Berkeley)

4:15 – 5:15 p.m.

Reception

9 – 9:30 a.m.

Coffee and Check-in

9:30 – 10:15 a.m.

Simple Proofs of Important Results in Market Design

Alvin Roth (Stanford University)

10:15 – 10:30 a.m.

Break

10:30 – 11 a.m.

Matching and Disclosure

Hector Chade (Arizona State University)

11 – 11:45 a.m.

Auto-bidding, Auctions, and Ad Allocation

Aranyak Mehta (Google)

11:45 a.m. – 1:15 p.m.

Lunch (on your own)

1:15 – 2 p.m.

The Intractability of Hylland-Zeckhauser and its Aftermath

Thorben Tröbst (UC Irvine)

2 – 2:30 p.m.

High Dimensional Calibration for Rational Decision Making

Aaron Roth (University of Pennsylvania)

2:30 – 2:45 p.m.

Break

2:45 – 3:30 p.m.

Stability in Tranding Networks

Zsuzsanna Jankó (Corvinus University of Budapest)

3:30 – 4:15 p.m.

Complementarities and Externalities

Thanh Nguyen (Purdue University)

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Update: the links in the final program now also include videos of most of the talks.

NBER Market Design Working Group Meeting, Fall 2023, Cambridge MA

 Market Design Working Group Meeting, Fall 2023

Friday, October 27

8:30 am

Continental Breakfast

Session 1: Equity

9:00 am

Equal Pay for Similar Work

Diego Gentile Passaro, Brown University

Fuhito Kojima, Stanford University

Bobak Pakzad-Hurson, Brown University

9:45 am

Market Design for Social Justice: A Case Study on A Constitutional Crisis in India

Tayfun Sönmez, Boston College

M. Utku Ünver, Boston College

10:30 am

Break

Session 2: Artificial Intelligence

10:45 am

Artificial Intelligence and Statistical Collusion

Martino Banchio, Google Research

Giacomo Mantegazza, Stanford University

11:30 am

Combining Human Expertise with Artificial Intelligence: Experimental Evidence from Radiology

Nikhil Agarwal, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NBER

Alex Moehring, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Pranav Rajpurkar, Harvard University

Tobias Salz, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NBER

12:15 pm

Lunch

Session 3: Auctions

1:30 pm

Auctions with Withdrawal Rights: A Foundation for Uniform Price

Alexander Haberman, Stanford University

Ravi Jagadeesan, Stanford University

2:15 pm

Unobserved Auctions

Hao Li, University of British Columbia

Michael Peters, University of British Columbia

3:00 pm

Entry and Exit in Treasury Auctions

Jason Allen, Bank of Canada

Ali Hortaçsu, University of Chicago and NBER

Eric Richert, University of Chicago

Milena Wittwer, Boston College

3:45 pm

Break

Session 4: Mechanism Design for Social Good

4:15 pm

Test-Optional Admissions

Wouter Dessein, Columbia University

Alexander P. Frankel, University of Chicago

Navin Kartik, Columbia University

5:00 pm

Maximizing the Effect of Altruism

Nicholas T. Wu, Yale University

Nicole Immorlica, Microsoft Research

Brendan Lucier, Microsoft Research

5:45 pm

Adjourn

6:30 pm

Group Dinner at Bambara (across the street from the Royal Sonesta)

Saturday, October 28

8:30 am

Continental Breakfast

Session 5: Distributed Ledgers

9:00 am

The Economic Limits of Bitcoin and Anonymous, Decentralized Trust on the Blockchain

Eric Budish, University of Chicago and NBER

9:45 am

Can Open Decentralized Ledgers be Economically Secure?

Jacob D. Leshno, University of Chicago

Rafael Pass, Cornell University

Elaine Shi, Carnegie Mellon University

10:30 am

Break

Session 6: School Choice

11:00 am

Leveraging Uncertainties to Infer Preferences: Robust Analysis of School Choice

Yeon-Koo Che, Columbia University

Dong Woo Hahm, University of Southern California

YingHua He, Rice University

11:45 am

Search and Biased Beliefs in Education Markets

Patrick Agte, Princeton University

Claudia Allende, Stanford University and NBER

Adam Kapor, Princeton University and NBER

Christopher Neilson, Yale University and NBER

12:30 pm

Lunch

Session 7: Signalling and Screening

1:30 pm

Comparison of Screening Devices

Frank Yang, Stanford University

Piotr Dworczak, Northwestern University

Mohammad Akbarpour, Stanford University

2:15 pm

Privacy Preserving Signals

Philipp Strack, Yale University

Kai Hao Yang, Yale University

3:00 pm

Adjourn