Advanced Topics in Matching Theory and Market Design

How to match people to other people or goods is an important problem in society. Just think of some examples such as (1) student placement in schools, (2) labor markets where workers and firms are matched to one another, and (3) organ transplantation, in which patients are matched to potential donors. The economics of “matching and market design” has analyzed these problems and improved real-life institutions in recent years. For example, economists have helped (1) NYC, Boston and other U.S. cities design their school choice programs, (2) medical communities reorganize their hiring procedure, and (3) organize systematic kidney exchange mechanisms to give kidneys to as many patients as possible. This is a subject that attracted much attention in 2012, as the Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to Alvin Roth at Stanford and Lloyd Shapley at UCLA who are pioneers in matching and market design, and the John Bates Clark medal (a.k.a. "baby Nobel") awarded to Parag Pathak in 2018.

This is a topics course. We discuss mechanism/market design, with the main (though not necessarily exclusive) focus on theory and application of matching theory. This class builds on basic knowledge in matching theory, but I will try to give quick review in the first few lectures. If you have never learned matching theory before, I recommend that you take a look at lecture slides in https://sites.google.com/***** and/or a book manuscript (in Japanese) at https://www.dropbox.com/*****