Hello!
After a long absence, I’m going to post a few things. First, I will post a link to the Wiki page about Mechanism Design (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design). Second is a link to a paper in progress by Daniel McFadden who is an economist at UCB (and the grandfather of a friend of my son Alex). The paper is titled “The Human Side of Mechanism Design” (http://emlab.berkeley.edu/wp/mcfadden120408.pdf) and looks at first glance like it might be of interest to us. I am hoping to read it more closely before we meet next week, but even with the best of intensions…well, you know.
I have been thinking about how to relate this “new” idea to use MD to our original question about fairness. We can think about using MD to develop a way to divide students into schools, but how does this relate to our notions of access, etc. MD might provide the mechanism (heh), but what about the desired outcomes? Is there a way to somehow combine the approach from our combinatorial geoemtry stuff (Rental Harmony) with this MD stuff (School Choice). I am leaning towards giving up on the “practical” at this point and seeing if we can get any interesting connections between these two areas/ideas….
