Pseudo Markets
Pseudo Markets are used by various organizations to allocate scarce resources when the information needed to make that allocation is dispersed and privately held. Course Allocation at the Wharton school of business, Feeding America and USTRANSCOM are some successful examples of pseudo markets. A common assumption for a pseudo market to work has been the “convexity” of the agents’ preferences. Without it a competitive equilibrium fails to exist. In this talk, I illustrate why this assumption does not hold in many applications, and how to overcome it with tools in Operations Research and Theoretical Computer Science.
Based on a joint work with Rakesh Vohra:
Improvement Properties in Preferences and Equilibria with Indivisibilities (https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~nguye161/delta_improvement.pdf)
