Many problems in operations research and the management sciences (OR/MS) 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 OR/MS. Market design is a field at the intersection of OR/MS and microeconomics, and considers properties of market mechanisms including allocative efficiency, stability, fairness, and strategic and computational complexity. Market design brings together theoretical, empirical, and experimental methods, with an aim of studying relevant tradeoffs for policymakers and managers. Applications include spectrum auctions, procurement auctions, energy 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)