Market design problems: Competitive equilibrium and stable allocation
Competitive equilibrium and stable allocation serve as pivotal benchmarks in addressing market design problems; however, they do not always exist. The absence of such solutions poses a major challenge, particularly in applications such as combinatorial auctions, resident matching with couples, and refugee matching with families. The primary challenges in these applications arise from the complementarities of preferences, where agents’ preferences over goods exhibit complex combinatorial independence. In this talk, I will introduce an approach that enables the reestablishment of competitive equilibrium and stable allocation by slightly relaxing resource constraints. The extent of relaxation aligns with the level of complementarity in preferences.
Thanh Nguyen is the Lewis B. Cullman Rising Star Professor at the Daniels School of Business, Purdue University. He earned his Ph.D. from Cornell and a bachelor’s degree from Eotvos Lorand University, Hungary. His research spans the intersection of economics, management science, and computer science. Thanh Nguyen is particularly interested in Market Design, Network Economics, Computational Game Theory, and Combinatorial Optimization. His research has been published in the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Management Science, and Operations Research. Thanh Nguyen has also received multiple grants from NSF and DARPA.