Economists often look at markets as given, and try to make predictions about who will do what and what will happen in these markets Market design, by contrast, does not take markets as given; instead, it combines insights from economic and game theory together with common sense and lessons learned from empirical work and experimental analysis to aid in the design and implementation of actual markets In recent years the field has grown dramatically, partially because of the successful wave of spectrum auctions in the US and in Europe, which have been designed by a number of prominent economists, and partially because of the increase use of the Internet as the platform over which markets are designed and run There is now a large number of applications and a growing theoretical literature.

The Handbook of Market Design brings together the latest research from leading experts to provide a comprehensive description of applied market design over the last two decades In particular, it surveys matching markets: environments where there is a need to match large two-sided populations to one another, such as medical residents and hospitals, law clerks and judges, or patients and kidney donors It also examines a number of applications related to electronic markets, e-commerce, and the effect of the Internet on competition between exchanges

About the Author:
Nir Vulkan, Associate Professor of Economics, Said Business School, University of Oxford, Alvin E. Roth, Professor of Economics, Stanford University and Nobel Laureate in Economics 2012, Zvika Neeman, Associate Professor, Berglas School of Economics, Tel Aviv University

Alvin E. Roth was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics 2012 for his work on market design. He received his B.S. from Columbia University in 1971 and Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1974. He taught at the University of Illinois from 1974-82, at the University of Pittsburgh from 1982-98, at Harvard University from 1998-2012, and he now teaches at Stanford.

Nir Vulkan is an Economics Professor at the Said Business School and a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford University. He has written many articles on market design and is author of 'The Economics of E- Commerce' (Princeton University Press, 2003). He has worked with many software and e-commerce companies designing markets mainly on the Internet, which are used by humans and software agents. His algorithms for automated trading have been used by hedge funds to trade futures in markets all over the world.

Zvika Neeman is a microeconomic and game theorist who specializes in mechanism design. He teaches at the Berglas School of Economics at Tel Aviv University. Prior to that, he held positions at Boston University and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.