- What problem was Mirrlees solving when he analyzed how a government should design income tax without observing citizens' true abilities?
- How does a second-price sealed-bid auction, as designed by Vickrey, make it rational to bid your true valuation?
- What common thread connects optimal taxation and auction design as economic problems of hidden information?
- Why did Vickrey never get to collect his Nobel Prize?
Mechanism Design and Auction Theory
Designing economic mechanisms and markets, including auctions.
- What did Michael Spence mean by arguing that education can function as a signal rather than a source of ability?
- How do uninformed parties design contracts to extract information from better-informed ones, according to Stiglitz's work?
- How did Vernon Smith use laboratory experiments to test whether real markets converge on theoretically predicted prices?
- What question does mechanism design ask that standard economic analysis does not?
- Why does private information make designing effective economic rules so difficult?
- Where is mechanism design theory applied today, such as in spectrum auctions or voting systems?
- How old was Leonid Hurwicz when he received the prize, and why did that matter?
- What is a stable matching, and what did Gale and Shapley's deferred acceptance algorithm guarantee about it?
- How did Alvin Roth redesign the National Resident Matching Program to eliminate last-minute scrambles?
- How was matching theory extended from school placement systems to kidney exchange networks?
- Why did the old regulatory toolkit of breaking up firms and capping prices fail for two-sided platforms?
- What is mechanism design and how did Tirole apply it to industry-specific regulation?
- How does platform economics explain why a firm might subsidise one group of customers to attract another?
- What is the 'winner's curse' in an auction with a common but uncertain value, like oil drilling rights?
- How did Paul Milgrom extend Robert Wilson's auction theory to interdependent values across multiple auctions?
- What practical problem led Milgrom and Wilson to design the simultaneous multiple-round auction format?
- How much revenue has the simultaneous multiple-round auction format raised for governments allocating spectrum?