Critical issues in the practice of market design

Abstract

The years since 1994 have witnessed the emergence of market design as a new discipline within economics, in which research and practice exert powerful mutual influences in matching and auction markets. The problem of designing well-functioning auction markets has led economic designers to revisit such fundamental issues as the definitions of commodities, the ways participants communicate with markets, the trade-offs between the incentives provided for truthful reporting and other attributes of mechanism performance, and the determinants of the scope of markets, especially whether and how trade in different goods is linked. © 2010 Western Economic Association International.