An Investigation Report on Auction Mechanism Design

Auctions are markets with strict regulations governing the information available to traders in the market and the possible actions they can take. Since well designed auctions achieve desirable economic outcomes, they have been widely used in solving real-world optimization problems, and in structuring stock or futures exchanges. Auctions also provide a very valuable testing-ground for economic theory, and they play an important role in computer-based control systems. Auction mechanism design aims to manipulate the rules of an auction in order to achieve specific goals. Economists traditionally use mathematical methods, mainly game theory, to analyze auctions and design new auction forms. However, due to the high complexity of auctions, the mathematical models are typically simplified to obtain results, and this makes it difficult to apply results derived from such models to market environments in the real world. As a result, researchers are turning to empirical approaches. This report aims to survey the theoretical and empirical approaches to designing auction mechanisms and trading strategies with more weights on empirical ones, and build the foundation for further research in the field

on the efficiency of team-based meritocracies

According to theory a pure meritocracy is efficient because individual members are competitively rewarded according to their individual contributions to society. However, purely individually based meritocracies seldom occur. We introduce a new model of social production called “team-based meritocracy” (TBM) in which individual members are rewarded based on their team membership. We demonstrate that as long as such team membership is both mobile and competitively based on contributions, individuals are able to tacitly coordinate a complex and counterintuitive asymmetric equilibrium that is close to Pareto-optimal, possibly indicating that such a group-based meritocracy could be a social structure to which humans respond with particular ease. Our findings are relevant to many contemporary societies in which rewards are at least in part determined via membership in organizations such as for example firms, and organizational membership is increasingly determined by contribution rather than privilege.social stratification, meritocracies, mechanism design, non-cooperative games, experiment, team production

An Approximate "Law of One Price" in Random Assignment Games

Assignment games represent a tractable yet versatile model of two-sided markets with transfers. We study the likely properties of the core of randomly generated assignment games. If the joint productivities of every firm and worker are i.i.d bounded random variables, then with high probability all workers are paid roughly equal wages, and all firms make similar profits. This implies that core allocations vary significantly in balanced markets, but that there is core convergence in even slightly unbalanced markets. For the benchmark case of uniform distribution, we provide a tight bound for the workers' share of the surplus under the firm-optimal core allocation. We present simulation results suggesting that the phenomena analyzed appear even in medium-sized markets. Finally, we briefly discuss the effects of unbounded distributions and the ways in which they may affect wage dispersion