Market Design.

• Position: Program and Working Group Meetings - Conference news

The NBER's Working Group on Market Design met in Cambridge on May 15-16. The field of "market design" examines the reasons why market institutions fail and considers the properties of alternative mechanisms, in terms of efficiency, fairness, incentives, and complexity. Research on market design is influenced by ideas from industrial organization and microeconomic theory; it brings together theoretical, empirical, and experimental methods, with an aim of studying policy-relevant tradeoffs with practical consequences. Working Group co-directors Susan Athey of Harvard University and Parag A. Pathak of MIT organized the meeting. These papers were discussed:

* Patrick Bajari, University of Minnesota and NBER, and Gregory Lewis, Harvard University and NBER, "Procurement Contracting with Time Incentives: Theory and Evidence"

* Francesco Decarolis, University of Chicago, "When the Highest Bidder Loses the Auction: Theory and Evidence from Public Procurement"

* Michael Ostrovsky, Stanford University, "Information Aggregation in Dynamic Markets with Strategic Traders"

* Luis Rayo, University of Chicago, and Ilya Segal, Stanford University, "Optimal Information Disclosure"

* Estelle Cantillon, ECARES, and Pal-Ling Yin, MIT, "Competition between Exchanges: Lessons from the Battle of the Bund"

* Itay P. Fainmesser, Harvard University, "Community...