Tuesday, October 16, 2012

A Nobel for Planning?

Very thoughtful set of comments.

he use of the word "market" in describing exchanges of every sort has become ubiquitous, even in cases where there is no actual price that helps clear the market or channel information. Perhaps due to this slippage, an interesting fact about the work receiving the award has been largely ignored. The concrete applications that are discussed as ways of "improving the performance of many markets"--such as matching residents to hospitals, matching donors to organs, and students to schools--are not really "markets." At least not if we think of markets as institutions where prices help clear supply and demand. Instead, they involve non-market interactions, where the matches are actually formed by centralized exchanges.

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2012/10/a-nobel-for-planning.html

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