The 15th ACM conference on Economics and Computation (EC'14, formally known as “ACM conference on Electronic Commerce”) will be held June 8-12, 2014 at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, United States. The CFP is now public and can be found here. EC'14 will be co-located with a meeting of the NBER Market Design working group, … Continue reading ACM EC 2014 Call For Papers

While this blog is mostly about theory, today I would like to talk about a real auction and how it relates to theory. I’ll focus on a fundraising auction for my child’s elementary school. As is common around here, the school has an annual community event called a “Walk-a-Thon” in which donations are collected towards … Continue reading Walk-a-Thon auction design

Imagine that two technology companies A and B sell similar products (e.g. phones) and they compete for customers. Some customers are loyal to one company or the other, perhaps because they already have products from company A that are incompatible with offerings from company B or visa-versa.  Other customers are willing to buy either product … Continue reading Prices, Competition, and Captivity

You are heading to Paris for the first time. You finally get there and it is time for dinner, you need to pick a restaurant. Of course you would like to avoid  Tourists-Traps. Traditionally, people were relying on rule of thumb, and if they were lucky and knew someone that has some useful information, they … Continue reading Community brain

By Ittai Abraham and Moshe Babaioff Can we use Economic insights to better understand the ecosystem of Academic Publication? In light of recent changes, how can we optimize this ecosystem? After all, this is a system with many participants with different interests: authors, publishers, academic institutions, consumers (of academic publications) which can all be modeled … Continue reading An Economic Perspective on Academic Publication