ABOUT
Agora (αγορά) is Greek for market as well as meeting place. The AGORA center is the successor of the ESEI group that was based in Zurich between 2010 and 2015 but went "down under" in 2016.
The focus at AGORA is to solve major open design problems and to gain an improved understanding of new mechanisms for auctions, contracts, matching, voting, trading, social learning and networking.
The aim is to advance our scientific knowledge and to provide practitioners with implementations that have been thoroughly tested in the laboratory. The combination of mechanism design and wind tunnel testing defines our approach to the design of better social, political, and economic institutions.
Market design offers a novel scientific approach to policymaking with the potential to transform the social sciences and public policy. It is an interdisciplinary field that combines insights from game theory, experimental economics, computer science, and operations research with domain-specific expertise from the environmental sciences, the financial sector, law, etc.
It follows an innovative reverse-engineering methodology that takes the goal rather than the institution as given. In other words, market design starts from a clearly specified objective and asks what institution can best implement it. Market design is transformative in that it breaks with the centuries-long tradition in the social sciences of studying existing institutions and instead proposes to engineer – that is to design, test, and build – new ones.
NEWS
2023
October
"Violations of first-order stochastic dominance" by AGORA researcher Williams is accepted by Journal of the Economic Science Association.
May
"Sealed-bid versus ascending spectrum auctions" by AGORA researcher Goeree, Bedard, Louis and Zhang is accepted by Experimental Economics.
March
Jason Tayawa will be joining AGORA later this year.
2022
April
"A Geometric Approach to Mechanism Design" by AGORA researcher Goeree and Kushnir is accepted by Journal of Political Economy: Microeconomics.
February
UNSOMNIA talk about market design "Think local, act global" by AGORA postdoc Garcia-Pola has been released.
February
Brett Williams will join AGORA in August.
February
Ningyi Sun becomes visiting academic at AGORA per April, 2022.
January
Anton Kolotilin becomes Deputy Director of AGORA. We thank Richard Holden for being Deputy Director in the past five years, and we congratulate him on becoming president of the ASSA.
2021
December
AGORA researchers Goeree and García-Pola are awarded an ARC DP grant for their work on Designing Efficient and Equitable Voting Mechanisms.
December
"M Equilibrium: A Theory of Beliefs and Choices in Games" by AGORA researchers Goeree and Louis is published in the prestigious American Economic Review.
August
Two Full-time Postdoctoral Fellow positions announced. The positions are based within the AGORA Centre for Market Design at UNSW. More information here.
August
Tribute to Konrad Mierendorff.
April
AGORA postdoc Garcia-Pola has been accepted to the professional development program UNSOMNIA with his talk about market design on the topic "How can we thrive in the 21st century?"
January
Media article "Do leaders make strategic decisions to minimise regret?" featuring AGORA postdoc García-Pola published at BusinessThink.
2020
December
Media article "How market design is transforming the role of economists into engineers?" featuring Jacob Goeree published at BusinessThink.
October
AGORA researchers Goeree and Luke Lindsay published the article "The Exposure Problem and Market Design" in the prestigious Review of Economic Studies.
October
AGORA researchers Goeree and Holden publish media article "Why do markets need designing? Lending Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ a hand" at The Conversation.
October
The paper "Hot versus Cold Behavior in Centipede Games" by AGORA postdoc García-Pola, Iriberri and Kovarik was accepted for publication at Journal of the Economic Science Association.
August
AGORA postdoc García-Pola publish "Do People Minimize Regret in Strategic Situations? A Level-k Comparison" in Games and Economic Behavior.
April
AGORA postdoc Bernardo Garcia-Pola semifinalist in the science communication competition Famelab with his talk.
January
AGORA researcher Goeree Visiting Professor at Stanford University until August.
January
The paper "Non-equilibrium Play in Centipede Games" by AGORA postdoc García-Pola, Iriberri and Kovarik was accepted for publication at Games and Economic Behavior.
2019
October
AGORA researcher Goeree wins the UNSW Business School Outstanding Research Award.
March
Two new postdocs are joining AGORA. Bernardo Garcia-Pola holds a PhD from the University of the Basque Country, while Lucas Pahl received his PhD from the University of Rochester.
February
AGORA researchers Bichler, Ferrell, and Goeree are awarded the INFORMS Design Science Award.
January
AGORA researchers Bichler, Ferrell, and Goeree are awarded the runner-up Wagner Prize for their paper "Designing Environmental Markets for Trading Catch Shares" in Interfaces.
January
AGORA researchers Bichler and Goeree, together with Vladimir Fux from the Technical University of Munich, published the article "Designing combinatiorial exchanges for the reallocation of resource rights" in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS).
2018
November
AGORA researchers Goeree and Louis are awarded an ARC Discovery Project grant for their project titled "Ranked dependent choice equilibrium".
September
AGORA Director Goeree was elected as a fellow to the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
July
AGORA researchers Bichler, Ferrell, and Goeree are awarded the EURO Excellence in Practice Award of the Association of the European Operational Research Societies within IFORS.
July
AGORA researchers Goeree and Roth are plenary speakers at the Tsinghua BEAT market-design conference in Beijing.
June
Ningyi Sun joins AGORA as Scientia PhD.
April
The new Handbook for Spectrum Auction Design edited by AGORA researchers Bichler and Goeree is discussed in InterMEDIA.
2017
October
AGORA researchers Bichler and Goeree publish the Handbook of Spectrum Auction Design with Cambridge University Press.
August
AGORA's work on creating new exchanges for fisheries permits explained in BusinessThink.