Many problems in Operations Research and the Management Sciences are concerned with the allocation of scarce resources. In a networked economy, such problems typically involve multiple decision makers. Economic mechanisms such as auctions and matching markets are being used to solve distributed resource allocation problems, and their design has been strongly influenced by techniques from Operations Research and the Management Sciences.
Market design considers properties of alternative mechanisms such as allocative efficiency, stability, fairness, strategic and computational complexity. It brings together theoretical, empirical, and experimental methods, with an aim of studying relevant tradeoffs for policy makers and managers. Applications include procurement auctions, spectrum auctions, kidney exchanges, labour markets, or digital advertising markets.
The AMD section regularly organizes
- a cluster at the INFORMS Annual Meeting, and
- a workshop at the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (see events page)
In addition, we sponsor special issues in journals and a department on Algorithms, Computation, and Economics at
Naval Research Logistics.