Press Release and 
podcast -- Yahoo Answers users seek advice, opinion, as well as expertise in research by Mark Ackerman, Lada Adamic and STIET fellow Eytan Bakshy Press Release -- Bluffing in prediction markets research by Rahul Sami and STIET fellow, Stanko Dimitrov
Podcast discussing the STIET research program with Jeff MacKie-Mason and Tom Finholt
STIET video showing lifesize, uncompressed fiber-optic video conference from UM Atkins room to WSU via OptIPortalAlvin Roth
Professor of Economics and Business Administration, Harvard Univ
4-5:30 pm
UM: 411 West Hall
WSU: 313 State Hall (via videoconference)
I'll discuss some things we have learned about markets, in the process of designing marketplaces to fix market failures. To work well, marketplaces have to provide thickness, i.e. they need to attract a large enough proportion of the potential participants in the market; they have to overcome the congestion that thickness can bring, by making it possible to consider enough alternative transactions to arrive at good ones; and they need to make it safe and simple to participate in the market, as opposed to transacting outside of the market, or having to engage in costly and risky strategic behavior. In addition, some kinds of transactions are repugnant, and this can be an important constraint on markets. I'll draw on recent examples of market design ranging from labor markets for doctors and new economists, to kidney exchange, and school choice in New York City and Boston. I’ll particularly focus on the incentive issues that were addressed in the initial designs, and on some that have emerged more recently.
See the following background papers: What have we learned from market design? and Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets
Al Roth is the George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration in the Department of Economics at Harvard University, and in the Harvard Business School. His research, teaching, and consulting interests are in game theory, experimental economics, and market design. The best known of the markets he has designed (or, in this case, redesigned) is the National Resident Matching Program, through which approximately twenty thousand doctors a year find their first employment as residents at American hospitals. He has recently been involved in the reorganization of the market for Gastroenterology fellows, which started using a clearinghouse in 2006 for positions beginning in 2007. He helped design the high school matching system used in New York City to match approximately ninety thousand students to high schools each year, starting with students entering high school in the Fall of 2004. He helped redesign the matching system used in Boston Public Schools, adopted for students starting school in September 2006. He is one of the founders and designers of the New England Program for Kidney Exchange, for incompatible patient-donor pairs. He is the chair of the American Economic Association's Ad Hoc Committee on the Job Market, which has designed a number of recent changes in the market for new Ph.D. economists. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society, and has been a Guggenheim and Sloan fellow. He received his Ph.D at Stanford University, and came to Harvard from the University of Pittsburgh, where he was the Andrew Mellon Professor of Economics.
For further information, please go to Al Roth's Game Theory, Experimental Economics, and Market Design Page.
