Topic: Tract housing, the core, and pendulum auctions

Speaker: Zhou Yu, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Economics, Nagoya University

Time: January 7, 2025, 14:00

Venue: EMS 210

Abstract:

We consider a model of tract housing where buyers and sellers have (i) wealth constraints, and (ii) unit demand over identical indivisible objects represented by a valuation. First, we characterize the strong core. Second, we characterize the bilateral weak core, or the weak core allocations with no side-payments. Finally, when buyer wealth constraints and valuations are private information and when transfers are discrete, we introduce two families of pendulum auctions, both of which consist of obviously strategy-proof implementations of the bilateral weak core. The buyer-optimal pendulum auctions are preferred by the buyers but are inefficient when side-payments are possible, while the efficient pendulum auctions are efficient.

Guest Bio:

Zhou Yu is currently an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Economics at Nagoya University and a Visiting Researcher at the University of Tokyo's Market Design Research Center (UTMD). His primary research areas include market design theory, auction theory, and industrial organization theory. His research has been published in both international and domestic journals such as American Economic Review, Games and Economic Behavior, International Economic Review, Journal of Economic Theory, and Economic Research Journal.