Market Design for Engineers

Markets are everywhere around us but don't always achieve desired goals. Market failures occur due to a variety of frictions and need design to be fixed. The design of marketplace varies depending on the type of goods and possible transactions. This course will cover methods and classic results to analyze the behavior of a marketplace, whether it is successful and how to fix it, building especially on game theoretic tools. The course will further explore the trade-offs between efficiency and equitable outcomes and how to reach desired outcomes. Applications include matching students to schools, college admissions and the failure the desire to balance equity and merit, assigning vaccines, assigning interns to hospitals, assigning organs to patients, auction designs and pricing, information design, online platforms, allocation of food, transportation, and emissions. The course is intended for undergraduates, masters, but also PhD students who are interested in exposure to market design. Prerequisites: basic mathematical maturity at the level of Math 51, and probability at the level of MS&E 120, 220 or EE 178.