Essays in Market Design

abstract: I study the design of two different institutions to evaluate the welfare implications of counterfactual policies. In particular, I analyze (i) the problem of assigning students to colleges (majors) in a centralized admission system; and (ii) an auction where the seller can use securities to determine winner’s payment, and bidders suffer negative externalities. In the former, I provide a novel methodology to evaluate counterfactual policies when the admission mechanism is manipulable. In the latter, I determine which instrument yields the highest expected revenue from the class of instruments that combines cash and equity payments.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Economics 201

Tight bounds on the competitive ratio on accomodating sequences for the seat reservation problem

The unit price seat reservation problem is investigated. The seat reservation problem is the problem of assigning seat numbers on-line to requests for reservations in a train traveling through $k$ stations. We are considering the version where all tickets have the same price and where requests are treated fairly, i.e., a request which can be fulfilled must be granted. For fair deterministic algorithms, we provide an asymptotically matching upper bound to the existing lower bound which states that all fair algorithms for this problem are frac{1{2-competitive on accommodating sequences, when there are at least three seats. Additionally, we give an asymptotic upper bound of frac{7{9 for fair randomized algorithms against oblivious adversaries. We also examine concrete on-line algorithms, First-Fit and Random, for the special case of two seats. Tight analyses of their performance are given

Ride quality and international standard ISO 2631 (Guide for the evaluation of human exposure to whole-body vibration)

The evolution of the standard, which is aimed at promoting research and production of more data, and providing some design guidance, is outlined and its contents summarized. Some of the assumptions and information on which it is based are analyzed. Its application to vehicle ride quality is considered in the context of the safety, efficiency and comfort of crew and passengers. The importance of establishing the precise criteria against which vibration limits are required is underlined, particularly the difficulties of first defining comfort and then postulating appropriate levels. Some current and future work related to improving the standard is outlined and additional suggestions offered

TOWARDS AN EFFICIENT DECISION POLICY FOR CLOUD SERVICE PROVIDERS

Cloud service providers may face the problem of how to price infrastructure services and how this pricing may impact the resource utilization. One aspect of this problem is how Cloud service providers would decide to accept or reject requests for services when the resources for offering these services become scarce. A decision support policy called Customized Bid-Price Policy (CBPP) is proposed in this paper to decide efficiently, when a large number of services or complex services can be offered over a finite time horizon. This heuristic outperforms well-known policies, if bid prices cannot be updated frequently during incoming requests and an automated update of bid prices is required to achieve more accurate decisions. Since CBPP approximates the revenue offline before the requests occur, it has a low runtime compared to other approaches during the online phase. The performance is examined via simulation and the pre-eminence of CBPP is statistically proven

A Review of Ancillary Services Implementation in the Revenue Management Systems

Ancillary services in air transport represent a set of services provided to passengers to choose from, enabling them to enhance their travel experience while accumu-lating additional airline revenue. Low-cost airlines pi-oneered the practice, but the separation of ancillary services from the basic service has become an intense-ly growing trend in the air transport industry over the last decade. This practice has enabled low-cost airlines to significantly reduce the price of the basic service. To remain competitive in an era of transparency provided by search engines, traditional airlines offer ancillary ser-vices in addition to the basic service. To meet the passen-ger’s needs, a whole range of ancillary services has been created. However, existing revenue management systems do not take this ancillary revenue into account when cal-culating reservation limits. If the airline knew that an in-dividual passenger is willing to pay more for ancillary services, the system would be able to adjust the availabil-ity of the service for that passenger during the booking process. A review of research on passengers’ willingness to pay for ancillary services is presented in the paper, as well as a review on research on the personalisation of ancillary services and challenges of integrating person-alised pricing into existing revenue management systems

Online Algorithms for Dynamic Resource Allocation Problems

Dynamic resource allocation problems are everywhere. Airlines reserve flight seats for those who purchase flight tickets. Healthcare facilities reserve appointment slots for patients who request them. Freight carriers such as motor carriers, railroad companies, and shipping companies pack containers with loads from specific origins to destinations. We focus on optimizing such allocation problems where resources need to be assigned to customers in real time. These problems are particularly difficult to solve because they depend on random external information that unfolds gradually over time, and the number of potential solutions is overwhelming to search through by conventional methods. In this dissertation, we propose viable allocation algorithms for industrial use, by fully leveraging data and technology to produce gains in efficiency, productivity, and usability of new systems. The first chapter presents a summary of major methodologies used in modeling and algorithm design, and how the methodologies are driven by the size of accessible data. Chapters 2 to 5 present genuine research results of resource allocation problems that are based on Wang and Truong (2017); Wang et al. (2015); Stein et al. (2017); Wang et al. (2016). The algorithms and models cover problems in multiple industries, from a small clinic that aims to better utilize its expensive medical devices, to a technology giant that needs a cost-effective, distributed resource-allocation algorithm in order to maintain the relevance of its advertisements to hundreds of millions of consumers

The Welfare Effects of Ticket Resale

We develop an equilibrium model of ticket resale in which buyers' decisions in the primary market, including costly efforts to "arrive early" to buy underpriced tickets, are based on rational expectations of resale market outcomes. We estimate the parameters of the model using a novel dataset that combines transaction data from both the primary and secondary markets for a sample of major rock concerts. Our estimates indicate that while resale improves allocative efficiency, half of the welfare gain from reallocation is offset by increases in costly effort in the arrival game and transaction costs in the resale market.