Showing posts with label market design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label market design. Show all posts

Thursday, January 4, 2024

Topics in Market Design: Econ 287/365: Winter quarter, Itai Ashlagi

Itai Ashlagi will be teaching Econ 287 this quarter, on topics in market design.  It's highly recommended.

He writes that the syllabus below is very tentative, and will depend in part on how many of the enrolled students took Econ 285 (Ostrovsky and Roth) in the Fall (back in 2023:-)

Topics in Market Design 2024, Itai Ashlagi

Market design is a field that links the rules of the of the marketplace to understand frictions, externalities and more generally economic outcomes. The course will provide theoretical foundations on assignment and matching mechanisms as well as mechanism design. There will be emphasis on theories at the intersection of economics, CS and operations as well as applications that arise in labor markets, organ allocation, platforms.

The class will further expose students to timely market design challenges and will we will host a few guest lectures. The class offers an opportunity to begin a research project. Students will reading critique papers, present papers and write a final paper.

Lectures: Monday 10:30am-1:20pm Shriram 052

Course requirements: (i) reading and writing critiques about papers, (ii), presenting papers in class, and (iii) a term paper.

Instructor: Itai Ashlagi. iashlagi@stanford.edu

Some potential papers for presenting:

Equity and Efficiency in Dynamic Matching: Extreme Waitlist Policies, Nikzad and Strack.

Eliminating Waste in Cadaveric Organ Allocation, Shi and Yin

Pick-an-object mechanisms, Bo and Hakimov

Monopoly without a monopolist, Huberman, Leshno and Moallemi

The College Portfolio Problem, Ali and Shorrer

Equal Pay for Similar Work, Passaro, Kojima, and Pakzad-Hurson

Auctions with Withdrawal Rights: A Foundation for Uniform Price, Haberman and Jagadessan.

Optimal matchmaking strategy in two-sided marketplaces, Shi

Practical algorithms and experimentally validated incentives for equilibrium-based fair division (ACEEI),

Budish, Gao, Othman, Rubinstein

Congestion pricing, carpooling, and commuter welfare, Ostrovsky and Schwarz

Artificial intelligence and auction design, Banchio and Skrzypacz

Selling to a no-regret buyer, Braverman et al.

Dynamic matching in overloaded waiting lists, Leshno

The regulation of queue size by levying tolls, Naor

Optimal search for the best alternative, Weitzman

Whether or not to open Pandora’s box, Doval

Descending price optimally coordinates search, Kleinberg, Waggoner, Weyl

Market Failure in Kidney Exchange? Nikhil Agarwal, Itai Ashlagi, Eduardo Azevedo, Clayton Featherstone and Omer Karaduman

Choice Screen Auctions, Michael Ostrovsky

Incentive Compatibility of Large Centralized Matching Markets, Lee

Tentative schedule:

Week 1: Two-sided matching, stability and large markets.

Week 2: One-sided matching, duality, optimization and constraints.

Week 3: Multi-item auctions, auction design, revenue equivalence, optimal auctions, interdependent

valuations.

Week 4: Congestion, dynamic matching.

Week 5: Waitlists, search and learning.

Week 6: Foundations of mechanism design.

Week 7: Robustness in implementation

Weeks 8-10: Projects

We will host several guest lectures. Presentations of papers will take place throughout the course.

Background references

1. List of (mostly applied) papers are given in a separate document.

2. Books

Roth, Alvin E.and Marilda A. Oliveira Sotomayor, Two-sided matching: A study in game-theoretic modeling and analysis. No. 18. Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Vijay Krishna, Auction Theory, 2010.

Tilman Borgers, An Introduction to Mechanism Design by Tilman Borgers.

Milgrom, Paul, Putting Auction Theory to Work, 2004.

3. Papers

(a) Introduction

Roth, Alvin E. The Economist as Engineer: Game Theory, Experimentation, and Computation as Tools for Design Economics. Econometrica, 70(4), 2002. 1341-1378.

Klemperer, Paul, What Really Matters in Auction Design?, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 16(1): 169-189, 2002.

Weitzman, Martin, Is the Price System or Rationing More Effective in Getting a Commodity to Those Who Need it Most?, The Bell Journal of Economics, 8, 517-524, 1977.

(b) Stable matching and assignment

Gale, David and Lloyd Shapley, College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage, American Mathematical Monthly, 69: 9-15,1962.

Roth and Sotomayor, Chapters 2-5.

Hylland, Aanund, and Richard Zeckhauser. The efficient allocation of individuals to positions, The Journal of Political Economy, 293-314,1979.

Roth, Alvin E., The Evolution of the Labor Market for Medical Interns and Residents: A Case Study in Game Theory. Journal of Political Economy, 92: 991-1016, 1984.

Kojimam, Fuhito and Parag A. Pathak. Incentives and stability in large two-sided matching markets. American Economic Review, 99:608-627, 2009

Abdulkadiroglu, Atila and Tayfun Sonmez. School choice: A mechanism design approach. American Economic Review, 93:729-747, 2003.

Abdulkadiroglu, Atila , Parag A. Pathak, and Alvin E. Roth. The New York City high school match. American Economic Review, 95:364-367, 2005.

Ashlagi, Itai, Yash Kanoria, and Jacob D. Leshno. Unbalanced random matching markets: The stark effect of competition, Journal of Political Economy,

Ashlagi, Itai and Peng Shi. Optimal allocation without money: An engineering approach. Management Science, 2015.

Peng Shi and Nick Arnosti. Design of Lotteries and Waitlists for Affordable Housing Allocation, Management Science, 2019.

Peng Shi, Assortment Planning in School Choice, 2019.

Ashlagi, Itai, and Afshin Nikzad. What matters in tie-breaking rules? how competition guides design, 2015.

(c) Auctions and revenue equivalence

Myerson, Roger Auction Design, Mathematics of Operations Research, 1981.

Milgrom, Paul. Putting Auction Theory to Work. Chapter 2-3.

W. Vickrey, Counterspeculation, auctions, and competitive sealed tenders, The Journal of Finance, 16(1) 8–37, 1961.

R. Myerson, Optimal auction design, Mathematics of Operations research, 1981.

J. Bulow and J. Roberts, The simple economics of optimal auctions, Journal of Political Economy, 1989.

J. Bulow and P. Klemperer, Auctions vs negotiations, American Economic Review, 1996.

P.R. McAfee and J. McMillan, Auctions and bidding, Journal of Economic Literature 1987.

P. Milgrom and R. Weber, A theory of auctions and competitive bidding, Econometrica, 1982.

Roth, A. E. and A. Ockenfels, Late-Minute Bidding and the Rules for Ending Second-Price Auctions: Evidence from eBay and Amazon.” American Economic Review, 92(4): 1093-1103, 2002.

(d) Mechanism design

Vickrey, William (1961): Counterspeculation, Auctions and Competitive Sealed Tenders. Journal of Finance, 16(1): 8-37.

Ausubel, Larry and Paul Milgrom, The Lovely but Lonely Vickrey Auction. in Cramton et. al Combinatorial Auctions, 2005.

J.C. Rochet, A necessary and sufficient condition for rationalizability in a quasi-linear context”, 1987.

K. Roberts, The characterization of implementable choice rules”, 1979.

F. Gul and E. Stacchetti, Walrasian equilibrium with gross substitutes, Journal of Economic Theory, 1999.

I. Ashlagi, M. Braverman, A,. Hassidim and D. Monderer, Monotonicity and implementability, Econometrica, 2011.

(e) Dynamic mechanism design and dynamic pricing

G. Gallego and G. Van Ryzin, Optimal dynamic pricing of inventories with stochastic demand over finite horizons. Management science, 40(8), 999-1020, 1994.

S. Board and A. Skrzypacz, Revenue management with forward-looking buyers, Unpublished manuscript, Stanford University,2010.

A. Gershkov, B. Moldovanu, P. Strack, Revenue Maximizing Mechanisms with Strategic Customers and Unknown, Markovian Demand

D. Bergemann and J. Valimaki, The dynamic pivot mechanism, Econometrica, 2010.

A. Gershkov and B. Moldovanu, Dynamic Revenue Maximization with Heterogeneous Objects: A Mechanism Design Approach, 168-198, 2009.

F. Gul, H. Sonnenschein, R. Wilson, Foundations of dynamic monopoly and the Coase conjecture, J. of Economic Theory, 1986.

D. Besanko and W. L. Whinston, Optimal price skimming by a monopolist facing rational consumers, Management Science, 1990.

(f) Dynamic matching

Itai Ashlagi and Alvin E. Roth. New challenges in multihospital kidney exchange. American Economic Review, 102:354-359, 2012

Nikhil Agarwal, Itai Ashlagi, Eduardo Azevedo, Clayton Featherston and Omer Karaduman. Market Failure in Kidney Exchange, 2018.

Anderson, R., Ashlagi, I., Gamarnik, D. and Kanoria, Efficient Dynamic Barter Exchange, Operations Research, 2015.

Mohammad Akbarpour, Shengwu Li, and Shayan Oveis Gharan. Dynamic matching market design. JPE, 2019.

Baccara, Mariagiovanna, SangMok Lee, and Leeat Yariv, Optimal dynamic matching, 2015.

Jacob Leshno, Dynamic Matching in Overloaded Waiting Lists, 2017.


Tuesday, December 26, 2023

Market Design in El Mercurio--Chile's oldest newspaper

Last Tuesday, in Chile I was interviewed by Eduardo Olivares, the editor for Economics and Business of El Mercurio,  which published the interview yesterday. We talked for an hour about market design generally, about how markets work when they're working well or working badly, and we spoke about school choice (where Chile is a leader) and transplantation (where it is not). The interview is behind a paywall, but below are some extracts (retranslated back into English via Google Translate).

On markets generally:

—Many people ask that “markets be free,” as has recently happened in Argentina. Should they be free?

“That's a complicated question. Markets should be free to function well, but they need conditions that allow them to function well. Having a free market does not necessarily mean a market without rules. A wheel can spin freely because it has a well-greased axle and bearings. A wheel by itself cannot turn very well, and the same goes for the market.”

—Who puts the oil in the wheel gears?

“That's the job of market design. Part of what makes markets work well are good market rules. The government has a role in regulating markets, concerning property rights and things like that. But on another level, entrepreneurs do things. Here in Santiago I [can]... call an Uber using the same app and rules I use in California. Uber is a marketplace for passengers and drivers. The rules can be made by both private organizations and the government.”

On prices:

—Do prices matter?

"A lot. “Prices are important to help allocate scarce resources, but also to make them less scarce.”

...

—When do they not matter?

“Let me start with when they matter a lot: in commodity markets. If you want to buy commodities, price is really the only thing that's happening. But when 'El Mercurio' wants to hire journalists, it doesn't limit itself to offering a salary: it wants it to be a good job, with special reporters. Price is important, but in other markets other things are also important. When you get a new job, the first question your friends ask you is not what the salary is, but who you work for.”

On school choice:

“Most markets are not commodity markets... In some markets we don't like prices to work at all. One of the places where Chile is a leader in market design is school choice: how people are assigned to schools and Chile has done a lot of work on this, although mainly for public schools.”

—What do you know about this system in Chile?

“Not long ago, before there was centralized and widespread school choice in Chile, there were the usual problems with decentralized school choice; That is, parents had to get up early to get in line, and they had a difficult process to register their children.”

—The new system has been criticized. Some claim it caused more people to choose the private system over the public school system. Isn't it similar to what is happening in New York, for example?

“There is something to that. In New York and Boston we also have a system that we call charter schools: free access schools, but organized by private entities, even if they are municipal schools. And they also have different standards. School choice is important, but it does not solve the problems of poverty or income inequality. Now, one of the reasons we have school choice in the United States and perhaps also in Chile is because we think that, otherwise, there is a danger that the poor will be condemned to send their children to poor schools. .

—Has there been any successful case in which parents can honestly rank the order of preference for the school they want their children to go to?

“In Chile, procedures are used that [make it] what game  theorists call a dominant strategy to express true preferences. The [remaining] problem is not in creating systems that make it safe to express preferences, but in distributing the information so that people can form preferences sensibly. In the United States, the hardest families to reach are those who don't speak English at home, so it's sometimes difficult to communicate with them. And different families have different feelings about what kind of schools their children should attend.”

“The benefits of school choice come from the fact that some schools may be high quality for some children but not for others, so we would like children to attend the schools that are best quality for them.”

On kidneys:

—You are famous for the proposal that allowed the “kidney exchange.” Years after the first experience, what do you see now in this type of market?

“Kidney exchange is working quite well in the US, but it works especially well for patients who are not too difficult to match. Even in the US, a fairly large country, we have patients who are so difficult to match that we have trouble finding a kidney for them.”

—And in other countries?

“Smaller countries, with 20 million inhabitants, like Chile, would benefit if we could make national borders not so important. When we look at transplants per million inhabitants, Chile is in the middle of the world. But since it is a small country, when the total number of transplants performed is analyzed, Chile has very few. Kidneys are obtained from both deceased and living donors. In Chile, as in much of the world, the majority of transplants come from deceased donors. Kidney exchange would allow more transplants to come from living donors ... “Twenty million is not enough, so it would be very good to see in South America an exchange of kidneys that can cross between countries, which is not so easy to do.”

Equality of exchange and the role of perceptions

“One of the things that worries people when talking about transplants is that [they think it might be] a medical process that exploits the poor. Of course, the thing about kidney exchange is that each pair of people gives one kidney and receives one kidney. It is very egalitarian. I think kidney exchange is a good place to combat this notion that transplantation is like trafficking,” he notes.

—Notions, perceptions are very important. Many people think of “exchange” as the exchange of securities in the stock market.

“That's right, but not every exchange involves money. One of the discussions about money in the world that is taking place in the European Union at the moment is about payment to blood plasma donors. In the EU, only Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and Hungary pay blood plasma donors. And those are the only EU countries that have as much blood plasma as they need. The others have to import everything, and they do it from the United States. The United States is the Saudi Arabia of blood plasma (…) The World Health Organization says that plasma must be obtained in each country, and from unpaid donors. You have to be self-sufficient... an economist finds that a little funny. Blood is a matter of life and death. “When there is a pandemic, we do not tell countries that they must be self-sufficient [in vaccines].”

—When we talk about these exchanges of blood plasma and kidneys, school choice systems, we are talking about the same idea: coincident or paired markets. But the concept of the market has been so questioned, especially by some political groups, for so long...

"It's true. Now,  kidney exchange is special because money doesn't change hands. Money changes hands to get medical care, you have to pay doctors, nurses and hospitals. But we are not talking about buying kidneys from donors, but rather that, at the patient level, each pair receives a kidney and donates a kidney. It is radically egalitarian. Many people who think about markets may not think of it as a market, but I think that's a mistake. Many markets are not just about money… we would worry much less about markets if income and wealth inequality did not exist. “What worries us about markets is that some people are poor and some people are rich, and markets seem like a way to give the rich an advantage.”

“There is no doubt that being rich is better than being poor. The real question is what do we do to alleviate poverty. Making it invisible is not the same as alleviating it. One of the reasons I think many countries don't allow blood and plasma donors to be paid is because they don't like the way that looks. It reminds them that some people would like to get some money and would donate blood for it.”







Apparently, according to the caption, I'm "affable and smiling" (although not in this picture:)

I was in Chile to participate in what turned out to be a wonderful workshop on market design at the University of Chile, organized by Itai Ashlagi, José Correa, and Juan Escobar.
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Update (Dec. 27): Here's an account of my closing public talk from the U. Chile's Center for Mathematical Modeling, one of the hosts of the market design workshop.

And here's a picture at the close, including some of those mentioned above: At my far left in the picture is José Correa,  who in addition to his other roles is Vice Rector for Information Technologies. Next to him is Alejandra Mizala, prorrector (provost) of the university.  Next to her (immediately to my left) is Rector of the University of Chile, Rosa Devés, and immediately to my right is market designer and director of the MIPP Millennium Institute, Juan Escobar. Next to him is Héctor Ramírez, director of the Center for Mathematical Modeling. And next to him (at my far right) is professor Rafael Epstein who (along with Correa, Escobar, and his daughter Natalie Epstein) has been involved with school choice in Chile, among other things.



Saturday, December 23, 2023

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:



Wednesday, December 20, 2023

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.]




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



Monday, December 11, 2023

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.

Friday, December 8, 2023

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:

Monday, October 30, 2023

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.

Thursday, October 26, 2023

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:

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