Not-quite-optimal market design

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract
This thesis contains two self-contained essays on market design. The first essay considers a many-to-one matching setting in which students list a limited number of schools as acceptable, and matches are formed using the deferred acceptance algorithm. I provide exact asymptotic expressions for the number of students receiving a top-k choice as a function of factors such as the number of students, the number and capacities of schools, the length of student lists, the correlation in student preferences, and the procedure for generating school priorities. I then compare outcomes across priority rules, and find that there is a tradeoff between the goals of assigning many students to their top choice, and leaving few students unassigned. For example, when comparing district-wide and school-specific lotteries, the former assigns more students to their first choice, while the latter assigns more students overall. The second essay considers a setting in which several advertisers compete in an auction for the right to place an ad. Each advertiser has a value that is the product of the "common value" of the impression and an advertiser-specific idiosyncratic "match value." Although most advertisers observe their value for the impression, one advertiser is unable to do so. The first result is that holding a second price auction for the impression may lose up to half of the available match value. Meanwhile, the optimal auction induces adverse selection and is susceptible to shill bidding. I introduce Modified Second Bid auctions as the only deterministic anonymous mechanisms that are fully strategy-proof and eliminate adverse selection. Furthermore, when match values are independent draws from a power law distribution, a Modified Second Bid auction captures at least 94.8% of the value generated by the optimal mechanism.

Description

Type of resource text
Form electronic; electronic resource; remote
Extent 1 online resource.
Publication date 2016
Issuance monographic
Language English

Creators/Contributors

Associated with Arnosti, Nicholas A
Associated with Stanford University, Department of Management Science and Engineering.
Primary advisor Johari, Ramesh, 1976-
Thesis advisor Johari, Ramesh, 1976-
Thesis advisor Milgrom, Paul R. (Paul Robert), 1948-
Thesis advisor Roth, Alvin E, 1951-
Advisor Milgrom, Paul R. (Paul Robert), 1948-
Advisor Roth, Alvin E, 1951-

Subjects

Genre Theses

Bibliographic information

Statement of responsibility Nicholas A. Arnosti.
Note Submitted to the Department of Management Science and Engineering.
Thesis Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2016.
Location electronic resource

Access conditions

Copyright
© 2016 by Nicholas Anton Arnosti
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).

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