Real estate auctions

 Peter Cramton points me to this article in the Orange County Register, about a real estate auction with a soft close, that ran for several months.

How ‘soft’ auction added $33million to price for Orange County County icon By Jonathan Lansner

"The federal government’s exit from the eye-catching Chet Holifield Federal Building – better known as the “Ziggurat” – began June 5. The initial auction deadline for the building plus 89 acres in Laguna Niguel was July 31, but it came with a big “but” in the rules.

"You see, this auction run by the General Services Administration has a “soft close” – if the high price is topped in a 24-hour period, the auction is extended for another 24 hours.

"And on July 31 – and for every business day through Friday, Oct. 4 – that extra bidding threshold was met. 

"Consider the math of this curious auction technique: On July 31, the first deadline, the Ziggurat price tag was $136.8 million. The 46 added days of bidding increased that to $169.6 million as of Friday.

...

"Cramton wonders why auctions of any style aren’t more widely used to sell all sorts of residential housing nationwide. He sees them as fast and efficient ways to maximize pricing.

"Yet, auctions are typically used only to sell US homes with financially distressed ownership.

"“We don’t need thousands of real estate agents,” the professor says."

########

He further says: "There are 1.6 million real estate agents in the US and 434,661 in California (including brokers)."

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The WSJ has this story on real estate auctions:

"The Wealthy Are Overpricing Their Homes. Auctions Show Just How Much. Desperate to sell, more rich homeowners are turning to the auction market—but the results aren’t always what they bargained for.  By Katherine Clarke  and E.B. Solomont, Oct. 30, 2024 

"More closely associated with pricey art or collectibles, auctions are on the rise for luxury real estate, with auction houses reporting a dramatic spike in the number of high-net-worth sellers seeking their services since 2020. Amid a slowdown in luxury home sales, auction companies are pitching homeowners on their ability to market unique properties to a range of deep-pocketed buyers beyond local markets and to sell them within a precise time frame.

...

"Auctions tend to attract the real-estate world’s white elephants—properties that may be quirky, highly-personalized or ultraluxury, resort-style homes in neighborhoods where that type of housing is atypical.

...

"Whether there’s a reserve price or not, Concierge takes a 12% to 15% buyer’s premium as a commission, plus there are agent fees. It markets the property heavily before the auction, and tries to generate early offers by offering prospective buyers a “starting bid incentive,” or 50% discount on the buyer’s premium if they submit a winning bid before the start of the auction."

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Peter C. emails the following comment (since comments on the blog are closed):

"Real estate norms vary by country. In Norway and Australia, auctions are the norm. In the US, transactions are brokered, sometimes aided by an auction process. In all countries, residential and commercial real estate transactions would be improved with a better market design that emphasizes transparency and efficiency as goals in solving real estate's economic problems. Market design research on real estate is needed."

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*I enjoyed comments when I allowed them, but closed them because each morning I had to delete spam comments advertising bogus kidney purchases and sales...:(

Market Design for Surface Water , by Ferguson and Milgrom

 The potential market for surface water is a market in which any transfer of rights involves externalities affecting the water consumption of others.

Market Design for Surface Water  by Billy A. Ferguson & Paul Milgrom, NBER WORKING PAPER 32010, DOI 10.3386/w32010, December 2023

Abstract: Many proposed surface water transfers undergo a series of regulatory reviews designed to mitigate hydrological and economic externalities. While these reviews help limit externalities, they impose substantial transaction costs that also limit trade. To promote a well-functioning market for surface water in California, we describe how a new kind of water right and related regulatory practices can balance the trade-off between externalities and transaction costs, and how a Water Incentive Auction can incentivize a sufficient number of current rights holders to swap their old rights for the new ones. The Water Incentive Auction adapts lessons learned from the US government’s successful Broadcast Incentive Auction.

From the introduction:

"Why is there so little water trading in California despite the heterogeneous uses and huge price differences? The consensus among many economists studying water is that much of the problem lies in an archaic system of property rights, which was perhaps simple and clear enough to function well when California was first settled, but which is dysfunctional today. We will argue below that trading in traditional water rights creates externalities, so efficiency-enhancing changes in water allocations cannot be achieved by exhausting profitable bilateral trades. Rather, it requires a coordinated, multilateral effort. The next section on the Institutional Background provides a description of water rights and the externalities that can result from trade or from certain other decisions about uses. What is most novel in this paper comes after that: we analyze a mechanism that enacts a change in water rights that could lead to much more efficient trade.

Our analysis draws on lessons learned from the US Broadcast Incentive Auction in 2016-17, in which some rights to use radio spectrum for television broadcast were combined, converted, and subdivided into more flexible rights that were better suited for wireless broadband communications. This was accomplished using an auction procedure designed to provide an “incentive” for broadcasters to participate. As in that auction, participation in an analogous Water Rights Incentive Auction could be entirely voluntary, with current water users incentivized to participate because they could trade their existing rights for new, more flexible rights and possibly additional payments as determined by an auction. Just as the Broadcast Incentive Auction achieved its goals described in the National Broadband Plan even though many broadcasters chose not to sell their rights, a Water Incentive Auction could provide the substantial benefits of more flexible water rights even if many water users decline to participate. We describe some details of a possible Water Incentive Auctions in a later section of this paper."

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.

SITE 2023 Session 2: Market Design Thu, Aug 3 2023, 9:00am - Fri, Aug 4 2023, 5:00pm PDT

 SITE 2023  Session 2: Market Design  Thu, Aug 3 2023, 9:00am - Fri, Aug 4 2023, 5:00pm PDT

Landau Economics Building, 579 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305

ORGANIZED BY  Mohammad Akbarpour, Stanford University, Piotr Dworczak, Northwestern University, Ravi Jagadeesan, Stanford University, Shengwu Li, Harvard University, Ellen Muir, Harvard University

This session seeks to bring together researchers in economics, computer science, and operations research working on market design.  We’re aiming for a roughly even split between theory papers and empirical and experimental papers.  In addition to faculty members, we also invite graduate students on the job market to submit their paper for shorter graduate student talks.

Thursday, August 3, 2023 8:30 AM - 9:00 AM PDT Check-in & Breakfast

9:00 AM - 9:45 AM PDT

The Combinatorial Multi-Round Ascending Auction

Presented by: Bernhard Kasberger (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf). Co-author(s): Alexander Teytelboym (University of Oxford)

The Combinatorial Multi-Round Auction (CMRA) is a new auction format which has already been used in several recent European spectrum auctions. We characterize equilibria in the CMRA that feature auction-specific forms of truthful bidding, demand expansion, and demand reduction for settings in which bidders have either decreasing or non-decreasing marginal values. In particular, we establish sufficient conditions for riskless collusion. Overall, our results suggest that the CMRA might be an attractive auction design in the presence of highly complementary goods on sale. We discuss to what extent our theory is consistent with outcomes data in Danish spectrum auctions and how our predictions can be tested using bidding data.

AUG 3  9:45 AM - 10:15 AM PDT  Break

AUG 3  10:15 AM - 11:00 AM PDT

Entry and Exit in Treasury Auctions 

Presented by: Milena Wittwer (Boston College)   Co-author(s): Jason Allen (Bank of Canada), Ali Hortaçsu (University of Chicago), and Eric Richert (Princeton University)

Regulated banks—dealers—have traditionally dominated Treasury markets. More recently, less regulated institutions, such as hedge funds, have entered these markets. Understanding this phenomenon and its consequences is challenging because there is limited data on how hedge funds trade. We document steady dealer exit and rising, yet volatile hedge fund participation in the Canadian primary market. To understand hedge fund entry and to trade-off the benefits of greater competition against the costs of higher market volatility, we introduce and estimate a model with multi-unit auctions and endogenous entry. A counterfactual analysis suggests that hedge fund entry was largely driven by dealer exit, and that competition benefits are large compared to volatility costs. This trade-off is likely present in other markets with regular and irregular participants, which can be studied in our framework.

AUG 3  11:00 AM - 11:30 AM PDT Break

AUG 3 11:30 AM - 12:15 PM PDT

Principal Trading Arrangements: Optimality under Temporary and Permanent Price Impact

Presented by: Markus Baldauf (University of British Columbia)

Co-author(s): Christoph Frei (University of Alberta) and Joshua Mollner (Northwestern University)

We study the optimal execution problem in a principal-agent setting. A client (e.g., a pension fund, endowment, or other institution) contracts to purchase a large position from a dealer at a future point in time. In the interim, the dealer acquires the position from the market, choosing how to divide his trading across time. Price impact may have temporary and permanent components. There is hidden action in that the client cannot directly dictate the dealer’s trades. Rather, she chooses a contract with the goal of minimizing her expected payment, given the price process and an understanding of the dealer’s incentives. Many contracts used in practice prescribe a payment equal to some weighted average of the market prices within the execution window. We explicitly characterize the optimal such weights: they are symmetric and generally U-shaped over time. This U-shape is strengthened by permanent price impact and weakened by both temporary price impact and dealer risk aversion. In contrast, the first-best solution (which reduces to a classical optimal execution problem) is invariant to these parameters. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that switching to our optimal contract could save clients billions of dollars per year.

AUG 3  12:15 PM - 1:45 PM PDT Lunch

AUG 3 1:45 PM - 2:05 PM PDT

Principal-Agent Problems with Costly Contractibility: A Foundation for Incomplete Contracts

Presented by: Roberto Corrao (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Co-author(s): Joel P. Flynn (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Karthik A. Sastry (Harvard University)

We study implementable and optimal mechanisms in principal-agent problems when agents’ actions are partially contractible. Fixing the extent of contractibility, we characterize implementable and optimal contracts. We provide conditions under which optimal mechanisms specify discontinuous payments for agents’ actions that take the form of “fines” or “bonuses.” When the principal can choose the extent of contractibility and additional contractibility has strictly positive marginal cost, we show that any optimal contract features a finite menu. This provides a foundation for the optimal incompleteness of contracts: even under arbitrarily small costs of contracting, optimal contracts specify finitely many contingencies. We apply these results to study optimal regulation of imperfectly contractible pollution, optimal incentive contracts when employees work from home, and the optimal pricing and remuneration of content creation.

AUG 3 2:05 PM - 2:25 PM PDT

The Simple Economics of Optimal Bundling

Presented by: Frank Yang (Stanford University)

We study optimal bundling when consumers differ in one dimension. We introduce a partial order on the set of bundles defined by (i) set inclusion and (ii) sales volumes (if sold alone and priced optimally). We show that if the undominated bundles with respect to this partial order are nested, then nested bundling (tiered pricing) is optimal. We characterize which nested menu is optimal: Selling a given menu of nested bundles is optimal if a smaller bundle in (out of) the menu sells more (less) than a bigger bundle in the menu. We present three applications of these insights: the first two connect optimal bundling and quality design to price elasticities and cost structures; the last one establishes a necessary and sufficient condition for costly screening to be optimal when a principal can use both price and nonprice screening instruments.

AUG 3 2:25 PM - 2:45 PM PDT

Incentive Compatibility in the Auto-bidding World

Presented by: Yeganeh Alimohammadi (Stanford University)

Co-author(s): Aranyak Mehta (Google Research) and Andres Perlroth (Google Research)

Auto-bidding has recently become a popular feature in ad auctions. This feature enables advertisers to simply provide high-level constraints and goals to an automated agent, which optimizes their auction bids on their behalf. These auto-bidding intermediaries interact in a decentralized manner in the underlying auctions, leading to new interesting practical and theoretical questions on auction design, for example, in understanding the bidding equilibrium properties between auto-bidder intermediaries for different auctions. In this paper, we examine the effect of different auctions on the incentives of advertisers to report their constraints to the auto-bidder intermediaries. More precisely, we study whether canonical auctions such as first price auction (FPA) and second price auction (SPA) are auto-bidding incentive compatible (AIC): whether an advertiser can gain by misreporting their constraints to the autobidder.

AUG 3 2:45 PM - 3:05 PM PDT

An Empirical Framework for Waitlists with Endogenous Priority: Evaluating the Heart Transplant Waitlist

Presented by: Kurt Sweat (Stanford University)

Waitlists that prioritize specific agents to achieve certain policy goals are common in practice, but policy makers often use endogenous characteristics of agents to assign waitlist priority. I study the heart transplant waitlist in the United States where the treatment that a patient receives is used to assign waitlist priority. Policy makers recently changed the prioritization in an attempt to reduce waitlist mortality by assigning higher priority to patients receiving specific treatments associated with high waitlist mortality. First, I document a significant response to waitlist incentives as usage of these treatments tripled once they were assigned higher priority, while usage of other treatments declined. Then, I estimate a dynamic discrete choice model of the treatment and transplant decision for patients on the waitlist to evaluate the effect of the change on the distribution of patient outcomes. Counterfactual outcomes estimated from the model demonstrate that the current design results in healthier patients receiving high priority treatments and better long-run outcomes. This is contrary to the policy makers goals of transplanting sicker patients and suggests that patients should be targeted using characteristics other than treatments.

AUG 3  3:05 PM - 3:45 PM PDT  Break

AUG 3 3:45 PM - 4:30 PM PDT

Trading with a Group

Presented by: Elliot Lipnowski (Columbia University)

Co-author(s): Nima Haghpanah (Pennsylvania State University) and Aditya Kuvalekar (University of Essex)

A buyer trades with a group of sellers whose heterogeneous willingness to trade is private information. She must trade with all sellers or none, and is required to offer sellers identical terms of trade. We characterize the optimal mechanism: trade occurs if and only if the buyer's benefit of trade exceeds a weighted average of sellers' virtual values. These weights are endogenous, with sellers who are less ex-ante inclined to trade being given greater influence. This mechanism uses sellers' private information in a continuous way, and always outperforms posted price mechanisms. In an extension, we characterize the entire Pareto frontier.

AUG 3  4:30 PM - 5:00 PM PDT Break

AUG 3 5:00 PM - 5:45 PM PDT Matching with Costly Interviews: The Benefits of Asynchronous Offers

Presented by: Akhil Vohra (University of Georgia)

Co-author(s): Nathan Yoda (University of Georgia)

In many matching markets, matches are formed after costly interviews. We analyze the welfare implications of costly interviewing in a model of worker-firm matching. We use our model to understand the trade-offs between a centralized matching system and a decentralized one, where matches can occur at any time. Centralized matching with a common offer date leads to coordination issues in the interview stage. Each firm must incorporate the externality imposed by the interview decisions of the firms ranked above it when deciding on its interview list. As a result, low-ranked firms often fail to interview some candidates that ex-ante have high match quality. A decentralized setting with exploding offers generates, at a minimum, the same welfare as the centralized setting, though the set of candidates who receive interviews is different. Total welfare is generally maximized with a system that ensures firms interview and match in sequence, clearing the market for the next firm. Such asynchronicity reduces interview congestion. This system can be implemented by encouraging top firms to interview and match early and allowing candidates to renege on offers.

AUG 3 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM PDT  Dinner

Friday, August 4, 2023

8:30 AM - 9:00 AM PDT Check-in and Breakfast

AUG 4  9:00 AM - 9:45 AM PDT

Describing Deferred Acceptance to Participants: Experimental Analysis

Presented by: Ori Heffetz (Cornell University and Hebrew University)

Co-author(s): Yannai Gonczarowski (Harvard University), Guy Ishai (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), and Clayton Thomas (Princeton University)

Designed markets often relies on carefully crafted descriptions of mechanisms. By and large, these descriptions implicitly attempt to convey as directly as possible how outcomes are calculated. Are there principled, alternative theories of how to construct descriptions to expose different properties of mechanisms? Recently-proposed menu descriptions aim to provide such a theory towards exposing the strategyproofness of real-world mechanisms such as Deferred Acceptance. We design an incentivized experiment to test the ability of a menu description (compared to a traditional description) to affect participant behavior and their understanding of strategyproofness. We also design treatments conveying the property of strategyproofness itself rather than the full details of the mechanism, with one treatment inspired by traditional definitions and one inspired by menu descriptions.

AUG 4  9:45 AM - 10:15 AM PDT Break

AUG 4 10:15 AM - 11:00 AM PDT

An Experimental Evaluation of Deferred Acceptance

Presented by: Jonathan Davis (University of Oregon)

Co-author(s): Kyle Greenberg (West Point) and Damon Jones (University of Chicago)

We present evidence from a randomized trial of the impact of matching workers to jobs using the deferred acceptance (DA) algorithm. Our setting is the U.S. Army’s annual many-to-one marketplace that matches over 14,000 officers to units. Officers and jobs are partitioned into over 100 distinct markets, our unit of randomization. Matching with DA reduced officers’ attrition in their first year in their new match by 16.9 percent, but these gains disappear in the second year. We can rule out a 1.5 pp reduction in attrition within two years. Matching with DA had no impact on performance evaluations or promotions. Although matching with DA increased truthful preference reporting by a statistically significant 10 percent, many officers matched by DA misreport their true preferences. We present new evidence suggesting that communication and coordination of preferences may limit the benefits of strategyproofness in matching markets where each side actively ranks the other.

AUG 4  11:00 AM - 11:30 AM PDT Break

AUG 4 11:30 AM - 12:15 PM PDT

Design on Matroids: Diversity vs Meritocracy

Presented by: M. Bumin Yenmez (Boston College)

Co-author(s): Isa E. Hafalir (University of Technology Sydney), Fuhito Kojima (University of Tokyo), and Koji Yokote (University of Tokyo)

We provide optimal solutions to an institution that has dual goals of diversity and meritocracy when choosing from a set of applications. For example, in college admissions, administrators may want to admit a diverse set in addition to choosing students with the highest qualifications. We provide a class of choice rules that maximize merit subject to attaining a diversity level. Using this class, we find all subsets of applications on the diversity-merit Pareto frontier. In addition, we provide two novel characterizations of matroids.

AUG 4  12:15 PM - 1:45 PM PDT Lunch

AUG 4  1:45 PM - 2:30 PM PDT

Pareto Improvements in the Contest for College Admissions

Presented by: Ron Siegel (Pennsylvania State University)

Co-author(s): Kala Krishma (Pennsylvania State University), Sergey Lychagin (Central European University), Wojciech Olszewski (Northwestern University), and Chloe Tergiman (Pennsylvania State University)

College admissions in many countries are based on a centrally administered test. Applicants invest a great deal of resources to improve their performance on the test, and there is growing concern about the large costs associated with these activities. We consider modifying such tests by introducing performance-disclosure policies that pool intervals of performance rankings, and investigate how such policies can improve students’ welfare in a Pareto sense. Pooling affects the equilibrium allocation of students.

AUG 4 2:30 PM - 3:00 PM PDT  Break

AUG 4 3:00 PM - 3:45 PM PDT

Test-Optional Admissions 

Presented by: Alex Frankel (University of Chicago)

Co-author(s): Wouter Dessein (Columbia University) and Navin Kartik (Columbia University)

The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the trend of many colleges moving to test-optional, and in some cases test-blind, admissions policies. A frequent claim is that by not seeing standardized test scores, a college is able to admit a student body that it prefers, such as one with more diversity. But how can observing less information allow a college to improve its decisions? We argue that test-optional policies may be driven by social pressure on colleges’ admission decisions. We propose a model of college admissions in which a college disagrees with society on which students should be admitted. We show how the college can use a test-optional policy to reduce its “disagreement cost” with society, regardless of whether this results in a preferred student pool. We discuss which students either benefit from or are harmed by a test-optional policy. In an application, we study how a ban on using race in admissions may result in more colleges going test optional or test blind.

AUG 4  3:45 PM - 4:15 PM PDT Break

AUG 4  4:15 PM - 5:00 PM PDT

Equal Pay for Similar Work

Presented by: Bobby Pakzad-Hurson (Brown University)

Co-author(s): Diego Gentile Passaro (Brown University) and Fuhito Kojima (University of Tokyo)

Equal pay laws increasingly require that workers doing “similar” work are paid equal wages within a firm. We study such “equal pay for similar work” (EPSW) policies theoretically and empirically. In our model, we show that when EPSW restricts firms by protected class (e.g. no woman can be paid less than any similar man, and vice versa) firms segregate their workforce by gender in equilibrium. This endogenously lowers competition for workers, as it becomes costly for firms to poach from one another–doing so exposes them to the bite of the policy. When there are more men than women, EPSW leads to an increase in the equilibrium gender wage gap. For a sufficiently high ratio of men to women, there exist equilibria with arbitrarily low wages for women, leading to a particularly large wage gap. By contrast, EPSW that is not based on protected class can decrease the equilibrium wage gap. We test our model predictions using a difference-in-difference approach to analyze a gender-based EPSW enacted in Chile in 2009. We find that the EPSW increases the share of employees working at gender-segregated firms by 3% and increases the gender wage gap by 3%.

Incentive auctions for water rights

 Here's a press release from Auctionomics, the consulting firm run by Paul Milgrom and his business partner Silvia Console Battilana. They propose to repurpose water rights in a way that may resemble the recent incentive auctions for repurposing radio spectrum.

From Lawsuits to Solutions: Auctionomics Is Harnessing Efficient Market Design and Deep Tech for a Litigation-Free Solution to the Water Crisis by Auctionomics 

"Earlier this year, Paul co-hosted a conference at Stanford University attended by a group of economists, lawyers, and water experts. The group developed a proposal for a novel policy to fix the Colorado River crisis: the U.S. should redefine and buy back existing water rights, just as it did for misallocated rights to radio airwaves.

Auctionomics led the development of the FCC's Broadband Incentive Auction, converting TV licenses to new valuable uses. The current issues with water rights are similar to those of the radio spectrum, where existing rights holders with solid legal standing were hesitant to change the status quo, despite the clear misallocation of resources.

However, Auctionomics successfully addressed the problem with its innovative auction design, facilitating next-generation telecommunications and raising $19.8 billion while safeguarding existing broadcasters.

The Colorado River proposal aims to address deficiencies in the current water rights allocation system. The existing system hinders mutually beneficial trades between users and prohibits water banking - a means to enable farmers or cities manage current water use more efficiently, leaving more in reservoirs for future dry periods.

While there are historical reasons for these limitations - the uses of river water are diverse, interconnected, and poorly measured. Modifying them can result in severe consequences in a system that guarantees inefficiency and overconsumption. However, the same model employed to redistribute broadband spectrum can incentivize water rights holders to use their water more efficiently.

Auctionomics aims to adapt this model to the Colorado River with practical steps involving a hydrological survey, voluntary redefinition of water rights, and purchasing enough new rights from willing sellers to meet the necessary reductions in total consumption."

Informationally Simple Incentives by Simon Gleyze and Agathe Pernoud

 Agathe Pernoud is on the Economics job market from Stanford this year, and is interested in the properties of information in environments in which agents may need to learn their own preferences.

Here are two papers that advance the theory of those situations, and expand on the fragility of 'dominant strategies' as the strategy space is enlarged.

Informationally Simple Incentives by Simon Gleyze and Agathe Pernoud, Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming.

Abstract: We consider a mechanism design setting in which agents can acquire costly information on their preferences as well as others’. A mechanism is informationally simple if agents have no incentive to learn about others’ preferences. This property is of interest for two reasons: First, it is a necessary condition for the existence of dominant strategy equilibria in the extended game.  Second, this endogenizes an “independent private value” property of the interim information structure. We show that, generically, a mechanism is informationally simple if and only if it satisfies a separability condition which rules out most economically meaningful mechanisms."

See also Agathe's job market paper:

How Competition Shapes Information in Auctions by Simon Gleyze and Agathe Pernoud

We consider auctions where buyers can acquire costly information about their valuations and those of others, and investigate how competition between buyers shapes their learning incentives. In equilibrium, buyers find it cost-efficient to acquire some information about their competitors so as to only learn their valuations when they have a fair chance of winning. We show that such learning incentives make competition between buyers less effective: losing buyers often fail to learn their valuations precisely and, as a result, compete less aggressively for the good. This depresses revenue, which remains bounded away from the expected second-highest valuation even when information costs are small. It also undermines price discovery. Finally, we examine the implications for auction design. First, setting an optimal reserve price is more valuable than attracting an extra buyer. Second, the seller can incentivize buyers to learn their valuations, hence restoring effective competition, by maintaining uncertainty over the set of auction participants.

Two courses on matching and market design in Stanford's MS&E department, by Ashlagi and Saberi (first meeting is today)

Itai Ashlagi and  Amin Saberi are offering courses on matching theory and market design this quarter. First meetings are today, in the morning and in the afternoon:

MS&E 230: Market design for engineers

Itai Ashlagi  T-Thu 9:45-11:15

Course description:  Marketplaces use algorithms and sets of rules in order to allocate resources among self-interested agents, who often hold necessary information. This course will provide key principles in engineering a marketplace, to identify relation between the rules in the marketplace and market failures, and how to redesign them to achieve desirable outcomes.  The course provides foundations of resource allocation systems building on game theoretic analysis.  The course explores economic and algorithmic tools from matching, mechanism design, auction theory and information design. Cases of existing and future marketplaces will be discussed, including ride-sharing systems, school choice programs, online dating, online advertising and organ allocation.

Some applied questions include: How should we assign students to schools? How should we match doctors to residency programs? Shall we price roads and the impact of tolls? How should we allocate affordable housing and arrange waiting lists? How should we incentivize hospitals to collaborate on kidney exchanges? How should we allocate food to food banks? How should reduce organ discards?  How can we assist in migration?  Why is some marketplace decentralized (college admissions) and others are more controlled? How should platforms set incentives? What incentives and frictions arise in blockchains? 

 **********

MS&E 319: Matching Theory
Amin Saberi  T Th 01:30p-03:00p

The theory of matching with its roots in the work of mathematical giants like Euler and Kirchhoff has played a central and catalytic role in combinatorial optimization for decades. More recently, the growth of online marketplaces for allocating advertisements, rides, or other goods and services has led to new interest and progress in this area.  

The course starts with classic results characterizing matchings in bipartite and general graphs and explores connections with algebraic graph theory and discrete probability. Those results are complemented with models and algorithms developed for modern applications in market design, online advertising, and ride-sharing.

Topics include: 

Matching, determinant, and Pfaffian
Matching and polynomial identity testing
Isolating lemma and matrix inversion, matching in RNC

Combinatorial and polyhedral characterizations 
The assignment problem and its dual, primal-dual, and auction algorithms
Tutte’s theorem, Edmond’s LP, and the Blossom algorithm

The Gallai-Edmonds decomposition, Berge-Tutte formula, and applications in Nash bargaining

The stable marriage problem
Gale-Shapley theorem, incentive and fairness issues
LP characterization, counting stable matchings

Matching in dynamic environments
Online matching under various arrival models
Applications in ride-sharing and online advertising

 

Computation of matching  

Combinatorial vs continuous algorithms, near-linear time algorithms

Matchings in sub-linear time, streaming computational models

Sparsifiers and stochastic matching 

Counting matchings  
The Van der Waerden conjecture, Bregman-Minc’s inequality
Deterministic approximations, counting matchings in planar graphs
Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms, sequential importance sampling
The Ising model, applications, and basic properties

***********

 

 

The Power of Market Design, by Paul Milgrom and Silvia Console Battilana in Project Syndicate

 Paul Milgrom and his business partner Silvia Console Battilana describe how market design can reallocate scarce resources from spectrum licenses to water rights.

The Power of Market Design, by Paul Milgrom and Silvia Console Battilana 

"Misallocation of scarce resources too often deprives users of them even as others waste their supply. Well-designed markets can overcome such problems by enabling voluntary transactions that allow existing users to retain their allotments while enabling higher-value uses.

...

"Many of the world’s existing rights to fresh water – both surface water and groundwater – have already been granted and grandfathered in complex ways to cities, farmers, and industrial users. In some cases, each individual trade of these rights requires governmental approval; other jurisdictions prohibit such trading entirely.

"These restrictions and historical rules have led to highly inefficient allocations. Water may be unavailable to towns that require more of it as they grow, even when those urban and residential uses are a hundred times more valuable than the rural ones they would supplant. Certain industrial firms whose rights are based on historical use may have an incentive to overuse water, even during droughts, to retain their rights to future allotments. Where trading of rights is limited or prohibited, poor price signals make it difficult even to assess which uses are most valuable. And water demand will increase and shift as climate change continues to upend historical usage patterns.

"The success of the US radio spectrum auction points to a solution. Instead of revoking incumbents’ spectrum rights unilaterally, Congress redefined them in a way that made trading them possible and simple, and then allowed TV broadcasters to decide for themselves whether to continue their previous uses or decline to participate. The rights that were sold were then reconfigured to be suitable for new uses and efficient trading, while those that were unsold remained fit for existing purposes."

Some economics of providing cloud computing, by Microsoft economists Hummel and Schwarz

 Here's a paper on an aspect of cloud computing by two Microsoft economists. (Microsoft's cloud service is called Microsoft Azure.)  In addition to the capacity question the paper models, it presents a brief, clear overview of the market for cloud computing.

Efficient Capacity Provisioning for Firms with Multiple Locations: The Case of the Public Cloud  by Patrick Hummel∗ and Michael Schwarz*   March 26, 2021

Abstract: This paper presents a model in which a firm with multiple locations strategically chooses capacity and prices in each location to maximize efficiency. We find that the firm provisions capacity in such a way that the probability an individual customer will be unable to purchase the goods the customer desires is lower in locations with greater expected demand. The firm also sets lower prices in larger locations. Finally, we illustrate that if a customer is indifferent between multiple locations, then it is more efficient to place this customer in a location with greater expected demand. These theoretical results are consistent with empirical evidence that we present from a major public cloud provider.

"2.1 Industry Overview

"The cloud computing industry is young, large, and rapidly growing. Although some of the concepts behind the public cloud were developed as early as the 1960s, all modern public clouds first emerged in the 21st century (Foote 2017). Today annual world cloud revenues exceed $250 billion and are expected to grow by another 20% in 2021 (Graham et al. 2020a).

"The public cloud consists of a wide range of services including infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS). SaaS involves providing applications such as web-based email and productivity software to a consumer that can be accessed via the Internet. PaaS provides a platform for deploying consumer created applications using the provider’s programming languages, libraries, and tools.

"And IaaS provisions fundamental computing resources such as processing, storage, and network to a consumer that can be used to deploy and run arbitrary software (Mell and Grance 2011)."

...

"2.5 Why Auctions are Not Used

...

"Since cloud providers provision enough capacity to almost always be able to meet demand, if a cloud provider used an auction to sell compute to customers, the final price at the auction would almost always be equal to the reserve price. However, since cloud customers typically have a value per unit of compute that is orders of magnitude higher than the corresponding capacity costs, in the rare event that there was not enough capacity to meet all demand, the final price in an auction would be dramatically higher

than the cloud provider’s costs. Thus, if a cloud provider used an auction to sell compute to customers, there would be a very high probability that all customers could obtain all the compute they wanted at a low price and a low probability that the final price would

be very high.

"There are two problems with this pricing that would make auctions unsuitable in practice. First, using an auction results in a very high amount of uncertainty about the final realized prices. Thus, if either the cloud provider or the cloud customers are at all risk averse, using an auction to set prices will not meet either the cloud provider’s or the cloud customers’ needs.

"Second, under an auction a cloud provider has a far stronger incentive to underinvest in capacity than under a fixed price mechanism. Under a fixed price mechanism, the cloud provider’s revenue can only go down as a result of underinvesting in capacity, as the cloud provider will not be able to service as much demand. But under an auction, underinvesting in capacity will significantly increase a cloud provider’s revenue by increasing the probability that there will not be enough capacity to meet demand, thereby increasing the probability that the final price in the auction will be very high. Thus, using a fixed price mechanism also enables a cloud provider to more credibly commit to provision the efficient amount of capacity. We illustrate these points formally in Appendix A in the

paper."

Milgrom's "Discovering Prices" reviewed in the JEL by Kominers and Teytelboym

 In the December Journal of Economic Literature:

The Parable of the Auctioneer: Complexity in Paul R. Milgrom's Discovering Prices

by Scott Duke Kominers and Alexander Teytelboym, JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC LITERATURE, VOL. 58, NO. 4, DECEMBER 2020, (pp. 1180-96)

Abstract: Designing marketplaces in complex settings requires both novel economic theory and real-world engineering, often drawing upon ideas from fields such as computer science and operations research. In Discovering Prices: Auction Design in Markets with Complex Constraints, Milgrom (2017) explains the theory and design of the United States' "incentive auction" that reallocated wireless spectrum licenses from television broadcasters to telecoms. Milgrom's account teaches us how economic designers can grapple with complexity both in theory and in practice. Along the way, we come to understand several different types of complexity that can arise in marketplace design."

And from the conclusion:

"So what have we discovered from Prices? Modern marketplace design increasingly wrestles with complexity; as it does so, we need novel, tailor-made theory as well as supporting infrastructure. Complexity has real economic meaning—and can take multiple forms."

Some links following the Nobel Prize to Milgrom and Wilson

 In my limited experience (but not just limited to my own experience) Nobel prizewinners are often asked about how they were notified of the fact that they won the prize, and by whom. Paul Milgrom and Bob Wilson certainly have one of the best stories to answer that question, and millions of people have already viewed the video from the Milgroms' Nest doorbell camera, as Bob tried to arouse Paul and give him the news.

Here's how USA Today covered that story:

Doorbell camera captures moment Nobel Prize winner is told by fellow recipient he's won

Paul Milgrom discovered via a Nest camera that he'd won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.<>

The Nest doorbell broadcast also to Paul's wife Eva, who was visiting family in Stockholm, and who was alerted at the same time he was. Here's the view from the Swedish press (including a video of the video playing on her laptop...):

Här väcks pristagaren av sin kollega: ”Du har vunnit Nobelpriset” , 

(Google translate: Here the laureate is awakened by his colleague: "You have won the Nobel Prize")

That before-dawn encounter was recounted in this early interview:

Telephone interview with Robert B. Wilson following the announcement of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. The interviewer is Adam Smith, Chief Scientific Officer of Nobel Media.

"AS: We just spoke with Paul Milgrom and he said that he heard the news by you walking across the street and ringing his doorbell.

RW: Well that’s right because he had turned his phone off for the … to get a good night’s sleep, and so somebody had to wake him, and he lives across the street so I just walked over and knocked on the door. I roused him.

AS: I think … I think this must be a first in the history of the Nobel Prize.

RW: Yes, how many times does … first to have a knock on the door, which sounds like something from the 19th century, and secondly that in fact the two of us live only, what, 40 m apart."

*****************

It turns out that Bob Wilson went to Lincoln High School in Nebraska (and that you can never escape your high school):

Lincoln High alum wins Nobel Prize in economics

MARGARET REIST, Lincoln Journal Star Oct 13, 2020 

"The Lincoln High School wall of distinguished alumni — the one with photos lining the school's main hallway — will need to make room for another photo.

"Robert Wilson, who graduated from Lincoln High in 1955, left for Harvard on a prestigious scholarship and ultimately landed at Stanford, won the Nobel Prize in economics Monday."

***********

Stanford published this picture: Stanford economists Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson win the Nobel in economic sciences

************

The day of the prize, the NY Times story by Jeanna Smialek got this fairly coherent quote from me before dawn:

“They haven’t just profoundly changed the way we understand auctions — they have changed how things are auctioned,” said Alvin E. Roth, a Nobel laureate himself who was one of Mr. Wilson’s doctoral students. 

***********

Joshua Gans, one of Paul's students, republished the remarks he had made on the occasion of Paul's 65th birthday (long ago...)

"There are so many things one could say about Paul but it turned out that I said what I wanted to say back in 2013 at a conference in his honor to celebrate his 65th Birthday."

*************

Bob's longtime colleague (and my one time housemate when we were grad students) David Kreps has a lovely essay, which includes this quote from Hugo Sonnenschein: 

"Great economists write great papers. But the greatest economists are those who found new schools of thought." 

David Kreps Lauds 2020 Nobel Laureate Robert Wilson

He writes that Bob's 

" impact on the discipline of economics, in my opinion, puts him in the company of giants such as Ken Arrow and Paul Samuelson: Bob is, as much as anyone, the founder of the “School of Economic Theory as Engineering.” Both in his own work, but even more through his influence on his students and colleagues, Bob has brought economic theory to the real world, both as a mechanism for understanding “how things work” and then in the design of better institutions. The Nobel Prize announced today is for his and Paul’s work on the design of complex auctions, such as the spectrum auctions, which is a prime example of economic theory as engineering. But, in addition:

• Bob himself has taken the theory of nonlinear pricing to practical applications in electricity markets.
• His student, Nobel Laureate Al Roth, brought matching-markets theory to the design of assignment algorithms, assigning MDs to internships, and to kidney exchange “markets.”
• His student, Nobel Laureate Bengt Holmstrom, brought incentive theory to practical considerations in the design of pay-for-performance systems (some in collaboration with Milgrom) and, more recently, to issues in financial institutions.
• His student and co-Nobel Laureate Paul Milgrom, besides his work on auction design, and in collaboration with our colleague John Roberts, brought economic theory to bear on the design and management of complex organizations (which, for my money, is even more important than his pathbreaking work on auctions; Paul could have been given the Nobel for any of several different topics, and his work on “the modern corporation” happens to be my personal favorite).
• And it continues: A third generation — students of Paul, Bengt, and Al, as well as others who have embraced this style of work and so became “adopted” members of Bob’s tribe — are building an intellectual edifice that mixes superb theory with real-world insight and applicability."

***************

Did you know that Paul has a company?  Here's the tribute on the Auctionomics website: 

Could the work of the latest Nobel laureate in economics be the key to America winning the 5G race with China?

***************

And amidst all the toasts, I had occasion to recall that the first footnote of my 2002 paper "The Economist as Engineer..." said 

"This paper is dedicated to Bob Wilson, the Dean of Design."

***********

Earlier post: 

Monday, October 12, 2020

Finally! Paul Milgrom and Bob Wilson win the 2020 Nobel Prize in Economics

Paul Milgrom corrects the record on spectrum auctions and market design

Paul Milgrom responds in detail to some scurrilous online criticisms and innuendos about market designers in general and spectrum auctions in particular.

 The Market Design Community and the Broadcast Incentive Auction: 
Fact-Checking Glen Weyl’s and Stefano Feltri’s False Claims
By Paul Milgrom*  June 3, 2020 (and republished on Digitopoly on June 14)

"In a recent Twitter rant and a pair of subsequent articles in Promarket, Glen Weyl [1] and Stefano
Feltri [2] invent a conspiratorial narrative according to which the academic market design community is secretive and corrupt, my own actions benefitted my former business associates and the hedge funds they advised in the 2017 broadcast incentive auction, and the result was that far too little TV spectrum was reassigned for broadband at far too little value for taxpayers.
The facts bear out none of these allegations. In fact, there were:

• No secrets: all of Auctionomics’ communications are on the public record,
• No benefits for hedge funds: the funds vigorously opposed Auctionomics’ proposals, which reduced their auction profits,
• No spectrum shortfalls: the number of TV channels reassigned was unaffected by the hedge funds’ bidding, and
• No taxpayer losses: the money value created for the public by the broadband spectrum auction was more than one hundred times larger than the alleged revenue shortfall.
...
[read the rest to get the facts...]

[1] “It Is Such a Small World: The Market-Design Academic Community Evolved in a Business Network.” Stefano Feltri, Promarket, May 28, 2020.
[2] “How Market Design Economists Helped to Engineer a Mass Privatization of Public Resources.” Glen Weyl, Promarket, May 28, 2020.

Paul Milgrom et al. on the incentive auction--two recent papers, and two pictures

Two new papers and two recent pictures on the FCC incentive auction, and the cornucopia of related results (including to auctions as knapsack problems) that Paul Milgrom and his colleagues have developed:

Incentive Auction Design Alternatives: A Simulation Study
KEVIN LEYTON-BROWN, University of British Columbia
PAUL MILGROM, Stanford University
NEIL NEWMAN, University of British Columbia
ILYA SEGAL, Stanford University
February 21, 2020,
Manuscript submitted for review to the 21st ACM Conference on Economics & Computation (EC’20)

Abstract: Over 13 months in 2016–17 the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) conducted an “incentive auction” to repurpose radio spectrum from broadcast television to wireless internet. This paper revisits from a computational perspective the descending clock “reverse” auction used to procure broadcast rights. We investigate the quantitative significance of various aspects of the design by running extensive simulations, leveraging a reverse auction simulator and realistic models of bidder values.
************

Investment Incentives in Near-Optimal Mechanisms
Mohammad Akbarpour, Scott Duke Kominers, Shengwu Li and Paul Milgrom
February 25, 2020

Abstract: In a Vickrey auction, if one bidder has an option to invest to increase his value, the combined mechanism including investments is still fully optimal. In contrast, for any β < 1, we find that there exist monotone allocation rules that guarantee a fraction β of the allocative optimum in the worst case but such that the associated mechanism with investments by one bidder can lead to arbitrarily small fractions of the full optimum being achieved. We show that if a monotone allocation rule satisfies a new property called ARNIE and guarantees a fraction β of the allocative optimum, then in the equilibrium of the threshold auction game with investments, at least a fraction β of the full optimum is achieved. We also establish generalizations and a partial converse, and show that some well-known approximation algorithms satisfy the ARNIE property.

"ARNIE (“avoiding relevant negative investment externalities”)
...
"The definition of ARNIE is as follows: Given any value profile and feasibility constraints, an algorithm outputs some set of packed bidders. Suppose we raise the value of a packed bidder, or lower the value of an unpacked bidder, and then run the algorithm at the new value profile. The algorithm is ARNIE if the new packing, assessed at the new values, yields at least as much welfare as the old packing, assessed at the new values."

*********

And here are two photos I snapped during a seminar Paul gave two weeks ago...

See my previous posts containing "incentive auction".

NBER Market Design meeting, Cambridge, October 18-19

Market Design Working Group Meeting

Michael Ostrovsky and Parag A. Pathak, Organizers

October 18-19, 2019

NBER
Feldstein Conference Room, 2nd Floor
1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA


Conference Code of Conduct

Friday, October 18
8:30 am	Continental Breakfast
9:00 am	Christina Aperjis, Power Auctions LLC Lawrence Ausubel, University of Maryland Oleg V. Baranov, University of Colorado, Boulder Supply Reduction in the Broadcast Incentive Auction
9:45 am	Gianluca Brero, University of Zurich Benjamin Lubin, Boston University Sven Seuken, University of Zurich Machine Learning-Powered Iterative Combinatorial Auctions
10:30 am	Break
11:00 am	Tayfun Sönmez, Boston College M. Bumin Yenmez, Boston College Affirmative Action in India via Vertical and Horizontal Reservations
11:45 am	Joshua Angrist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NBER Parag A. Pathak, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NBER Roman Zarate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Choice and Consequence: Assessing Mismatch at Chicago Exam Schools
12:30 pm	Lunch
2:00 pm	Marek Pycia, University of Zurich Invariance and Matching Market Outcomes
2:45 pm	Nicole Immorlica, Microsoft Research Jacob D. Leshno, University of Chicago Irene Y. Lo, Stanford University Brendan Lucier, Microsoft Research Information Acquisition Costs in Matching Markets
3:30 pm	Break
4:00 pm	Mohammad Akbarpour, Stanford University Julien Combe, University College London Yinghua He, Rice University Victor Hiller, Université Paris 2 Robert Shimer, University of Chicago and NBER Olivier Tercieux, Paris School of Economics Unpaired Kidney Exchange: Overcoming Double Coincidence of Wants without Money
4:45 pm	Liran Einav, Stanford University and NBER Amy Finkelstein, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NBER Yunan Ji, Harvard University Neale Mahoney, University of Chicago and NBER Voluntary Regulation: Evidence from Medicare Bundled Payments
5:30 pm	Adjourn
6:30 pm	Group Dinner at Bambara (across the street from the Royal Sonesta Hotel)
Saturday, October 19
8:30 am	Continental Breakfast
9:00 am	Yannai A. Gonczarowski, Microsoft Research Lior Kovalio, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Noam Nisan, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Assaf Romm, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Stanford University Matching for the Israeli "Mechinot" Gap-Year Programs: Handling Rich Diversity Requirements
9:45 am	Amanda Y. Agan, Rutgers University and NBER Bo Cowgill, Columbia University Laura K. Gee, Tufts University Salary Disclosure and Hiring: Field Experimental Evidence from a Two-Sided Audit Study
10:30 am	Break
11:00 am	Nick Arnosti, Columbia University Peng Shi, University of Southern California Design of Lotteries and Waitlists for Affordable Housing Allocation
11:45 am	Daniel C. Waldinger, New York University Targeting In-Kind Transfers Through Market Design: A Revealed Preference Analysis of Public Housing Allocation
12:30 pm	Adjourn
	FORMAT 35 mins presenter 10 mins discussion