Marktdesign

Marktdesign, or market design, is a field of economics and game theory that studies how to construct and modify the rules of markets and allocation mechanisms to achieve desirable outcomes such as efficiency, stability, and fairness. The central question is how institutional design—pricing rules, timing, information structure, and eligibility constraints—shapes participants' incentives and market performance. The subfields of marktdesign include mechanism design, which studies how to tailor rules to align incentives with goals, and matching theory, which addresses how to pair agents in markets without monetary transfers, such as students to schools or doctors to patients. Auction design, another important area, designs bidding rules and formats for scarce resources.

Common applications include organ transplant allocation (kidney exchange programs), school choice and public housing assignment, labor and health care markets, spectrum and other asset auctions, and online advertising auctions. Real-world implementations often combine multiple design elements, rely on computational tools, and require governance and oversight to ensure fairness and transparency.

Historically, marktdesign draws on mechanism design theory from economists such as Hurwicz and Maskin, and on matching theory from Gale and Shapley. Key practitioners include Lloyd Shapley and Alvin E. Roth, whose work on matching markets and their practical deployments, like the National Residency Matching Program and kidney exchange, have shaped policy. The field continues to evolve with advances in experimental economics, data science, and platform-based marketplaces.

Challenges include preventing gaming, ensuring robustness to strategic manipulation, addressing equity concerns, and evaluating outcomes through pilots and monitoring.