Patents award innovators a fixed period of market exclusivity, e.g., 20 years in the United States. Yet, since in many industries firms file patents at the time of discovery ("invention") rather than first sale ("commercialization"), effective patent terms vary: inventions that commercialize at...

This paper proposes a new mechanism for combinatorial assignment—for example, assigning schedules of courses to students—based on an approximation to competitive equilibrium from equal incomes (CEEI) in which incomes are unequal but arbitrarily close together. The main technical result is an...

This paper uses data consisting of students' strategically reported preferences and their underlying true preferences to study the course allocation mechanism used at Harvard Business School. We show that the mechanism is manipulable in theory, manipulated in practice, and that these...

Randomization is commonplace in everyday resource allocation. We generalize the theory of randomized assignment to accommodate multi-unit allocations and various real-world constraints, such as group-specific quotas ("controlled choice") in school choice and house allocation, and scheduling and...

This paper uses data consisting of students' strategically reported preferences and their underlying true preferences to study the course allocation mechanism used at Harvard Business School. We show that the mechanism is manipulable in theory, manipulated in practice, and that these...

Our recent research (Budish, Cramton, and Shim 2013) proposes frequent batch auctions—uniform-price sealed-bid double auctions conducted at frequent but discrete time intervals—as a market design alternative to continuous-time trading in financial markets. This short paper discusses the...

We investigate whether private research investments are distorted away from long-term projects. Our theoretical model highlights two potential sources of this distortion: short-termism and the fixed patent term. Our empirical context is cancer research, where clinical trials – and hence,...

We use theory and field data to study the draft mechanism used to allocate courses at Harvard Business School. We show that the draft is manipulable in theory, manipulated in practice, and that these manipulations cause significant welfare loss. Nevertheless, we find that welfare is higher than...