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Base de données des enseignements et séminaires de l'EHESS

Market design seeks to offer practical solutions to various resource allocation problems. The field has recently enjoyed successes in applying economics tools and insights to improve the methods for organizing professional labor markets such as those for teachers or medical interns, for assigning students to public schools, for the allocation of social housing, for exchanging kidney donors with medical incompatibilities among transplant patients, for allocating government resources such as the spectrum (the FCC auctions in US and auctions for mobile phone licenses) or the advertising slots on internet (Google and Yahoo!'s keyword auctions). The general goal of market design consists not only in analyzing markets for the assignment of these “items”, but also in designing those markets and proposing new solutions in particular ones to use new computational technologies (combinatorial auctions are used in energy markets).

The course will present the theory of market design and its applications in two parts.

1. An important constraint encountered in many real-world allocation problems is that monetary transfers are limited or unavailable; for instance, public school seats and human kidneys cannot be traded for money. The first part of this class will cover the theory of market design when no monetary transfers are allowed. We will put a particular emphasis on applications to real world problems such as the assignment of public school seats to students, of social housing to agents, of kidney to sick patients, of teachers to schools... This strand of market design is referred to as matching.

2. The second half will cover the theory when monetary transfers are allowed. as in auctions and procurements There will be some lectures on the basic auction theory and classical results, but we will try to focus on newer material and open questions arising from applications such as search ad auctions, allocation of government resources such as radio spectrum (FCC),…

As a general goal, we will study existing or new market institutions, understand their properties, and think about whether they can be improved based on a mixture of theoretical, experimental, and empirical methods. However, the main part of the course will be oriented to the presentation of the market rules/algorithms and the fundamental theoretical results that anyone in this field should have in mind.

36 h course = 6 ECTS

http://www.parisschoolofeconomics.eu/fr/formations-et-vie-etudiante/masters/ape-analyse-et-politique-economiques/