Market Design Workshop – Sep 30, 2013

The College of Liberal Arts has funded a market design initiative for the academic year 2013-2014, as part of a Strategic Development Fund grant. Market design is the comprehensive use of economic theory, experimental economics, and computational methods in order to study practical and policy relevant resource allocation problems. As part of this project, Tayfun Sonmez (Boston College) offered a minicourse on market design in fall 2013; Catherine Eckel coordinated a reading group in market design; and Guoqiang Tian, Alex Brown, and Rodrigo Velez taught advanced graduate classes in experimental methods, mechanism design, and matching. This grant also provided funding for pilot experiments. The economics department at Texas A&M University hosted the 2nd Texas Economics Theory Camp. This conference is a collaborative effort between the most prominent economic theory/experimental groups in the state of Texas, i.e., Rice U., SMU, Texas A&M U., U. of Houston, U.T. Austin, and U.T. Dallas. The main objective of this conference is to bring together senior faculty, junior faculty, and graduate students in economic theory from the participant schools, giving priority to junior faculty and graduate students to showcase their research and receive feedback from senior faculty. Tayfun Sonmez (Boston College) taught a mini-course on Market Design in the Department of Economics at Texas A&M University Sept. 25th-30th, 2013. The mini-course provided an overview of some recent research and policy work on matching markets. The focus of the course was on the evolution of the literature both from a theoretical and also practical perspective. Topics included two-sided matching, house allocation, school choice, kidney exchange, matching with contracts, and cadet branching.