8/17/2008

picked up some of the international editions of my core textbooks, they're mostly your standard graduate texts save some intro books which i'm revising out of... mostly pretty dry.

klemperer's auction theory is wonderful, it's not so much a textbook as a case study... he was the guy that did the consultancy work for uk's 3G auction together with ken binmore... so it has detailed analyses of all the european 3G auctions, what went right, what went wrong. and although he is quite a theorist himself, he readily admits that undergrad micro and a good understanding of industrial organization are really more important than doing sophisticated gymnastics using nash equilibria and bayesian statistics... at the end of the day, an auction is a game and people are going to try to game it so your concern should be to try to take into account that players are always gonna be smart and find ways to collude. auctions really work well only with a large enough market, like NUS' CORS. but i still have doubts of it being an efficient way of handling course allocation.

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