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Financial Market Design

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This page collects my work related to financial market design. My best known conceptual ideas in this area are frequent batch auctions and sniping. Frequent batch auctions is a market design alternative to continuous trading on financial exchanges. Mathematically, instead of trading in continuous time as a serial process — which means that being a nanosecond faster is treated as economically meaningful by the market design — trade is in discrete time as a batch process, using auctions. Sniping refers to arbitrage that is primarily a contest in speed, also known as picking off stale quotes. Mathematically, sniping refers to arbitrage rents that arise from symmetric public information — information that is broadly disseminated to the whole market at the same time — as distinct from asymmetric private information.

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COVID-19 and Pandemic Policy

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This paper collects my work related to the Covid-19 crisis. My research argues that the Covid-19 crisis demanded a novel play in the epi playbook: vaccinate the world as fast as possible, and in the interim, aim to maximize societal and economic well-being subject to the constraint that the virus does not spread exponentially. In math, “Maximize Utility subject to R<1”.

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Course Allocation

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This page collects my work on the market design problem of course allocation, also known as multi-unit or combinatorial assignment. My best known conceptual ideas in this area are the course allocation mechanism “Approximate Competitive Equilibrium from Equal Incomes” (A-CEEI) and the associated approximate fairness and incentives criteria: Envy Bounded by a Single Good (EF-1), Maximin Share (MMS), and Strategy-proof in the Large (SP-L).

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Market Design Theory

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This page collects my work on market design theory. Readers may also wish to look at the page specifically on the course allocation problem, which has significant overlap.

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Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains

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This page collects my work on cryptocurrencies and blockchains. My main conceptual idea in this area is in equations (1)-(3) of the June 2018 “Economic Limits” paper. These equations show that the anonymous, decentralized trust invented by Satoshi Nakamoto is very expensive: the ongoing, “flow” cost of maintaining the trust has to be large relative to the one-off, “stock” value of attacking the system.

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Patents and Innovation

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This page collects my work related to patents and innovation.

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Ticket Markets

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This page collects my work on ticket markets. This market has been of interest to me for a long time, dating back to queues at Ticketmaster kiosks for concert tickets as a teenager, and going with my dad to see the Mets clinch the 1986 pennant with scalped tickets.

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Greatest Hits

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