Market Design A Linear Programming Approach to Auctions and Matching

The digital economy led to many new services where supply is matched with demand for various types of goods and services. More and more people and organizations are now in a position to design market rules that are being implemented in software. The design of markets is challenging as it needs to consider strategic behavior of market participants, psychological factors, and computational problems in order to implement the objectives of a designer. Market models in economics have not lost their importance, but the recent years have led to many new insights and principles for the design of markets, which are beyond traditional economic theory. This book introduces the fundamentals of market design, an engineering field concerned with the design of real-world markets.

1. Introduction; Part I. Microeconomic Fundamentals: 2. Game-theoretical basics; 3. Mechanism design; 4. Single-object auctions; Part II. Multi-Object Auction Design: 5. An overview of multi-object auctions; 6. The simultaneous multi-round auction format; 7. Sealed-bid multi-object auctions; 8. Open multi-object auctions; 9. The combinatorial clock auction formats; Part III. Approximation and Matching Markets; 10. Approximation mechanisms; 11. Matching markets; 12. Outlook; Part IV. Appendices: Mathematical Optimization; A. Linear optimization; B. Algorithms and complexity.

Martin Bichler is Professor of Informatics at the Technische Universität München (TUM), and a faculty member at the TUM School of Management. He is best known for his academic work on market design, and he has acted as a consultant for private and public organizations. Projects in which he is involved include the design of auctions for advertising, industrial procurement and logistics, fishery access rights, and spectrum sales. His research addresses algorithmic, game-theoretical, and behavioral questions and has appeared in leading journals in computer science, economics, operations research, and management science. He is currently Editor of Business and Information Systems Engineering and serves on the editorial boards of several academic journals.