Patients needing kidney transplants may have donors who cannot donate to them because of blood or tissue incompatibility. Incompatible patient-donor pairs can exchange donor kidneys with other pairs only when there is a “double coincidence of wants.†Developing infrastructure to...

A great deal of late bidding has been observed on internet auctions such as eBay, which employ a second price auction with a fixed deadline. Much less late bidding has been observed on internet auctions such as those run by Amazon, which employ similar auction rules, but use an ending rule that...

This essay discusses some things we have learned about markets, in the process of designing marketplaces to fix market failures. To work well, marketplaces have to provide thickness, i.e. they need to attract a large enough proportion of the potential participants in the market; they have to...

Many markets have “unraveled†and experienced inefficient, early, dispersed transactions, and subsequently developed institutions to delay transaction timing. It has previously proved difficult, however, to measure and identify the resulting efficiency gains. Prior to 1992, college...

In September 1998, the Judicial Conference of the United States abandoned its latest attempt to regulate the timing of interviews and offers in the law clerk selection process. This paper surveys the further unraveling of the market since then, makes comparisons with other entry level...

The deferred acceptance algorithm proposed by Gale and Shapley (1962) has had a profound influence on market design, both directly, by being adapted into practical matching mechanisms, and, indirectly, by raising new theoretical questions. Deferred acceptance algorithms are at the basis of a...