Lecture Title: Tract Housing, the Core, and Pendulum Auctions

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

Lecture Time: January 7, 2025, 2:00 PM

Lecture Venue: Room 210, College Building

Abstract of the Lecture:

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.

Speaker Information:

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