Annotation
This is an advanced undergraduate course introducing the students to the issues of market design: how to solve problems of economic resource allocation via markets. We will pay special attention to markets where prices cannot be used to match supply and demand. We will begin by studying matching algorithms: how to match doctors to hospitals, how to design an exchange for organ transplants, how to match students to schools or dormitories etc. We will prove some important results about properties of some of the leading matching algorithms. We will also look at data to investigate empirically (and experimentally) why some centralized clearing houses might have failed and some survived. Depending on time we will also look at issues caused by asymmetric information: why some markets may unravel completely when asymmetric information between sellers and buyers might be present and how this can be solved.
In AY 2018/19, the course will be offered in the week January 21-25, 2019 in Room 314, every day 12:00-13:30. There will be a take-home final exam.