Engineering Fairness? Market Design as a Resource for Social Justice Research

Excerpt

Justice conflicts are prevalent across many instances of human interaction. Social justice research has a long history of addressing these issues and investigating them from a broad scope of disciplines such as psychology, sociology, political science, and economics. This book review essay introduces a relatively novel branch of economics—market design—to the audience of social justice researchers. It sketches its main thoughts and avenues of research along with applications in domains relevant for social justice research. In 2012, Alvin E. Roth shared the Bank of Sweden Prize in Memory of Alfred Nobel in Economic Science (commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics) with Lloyd E. Shapley for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design. In “Who gets what and Why? The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design” (2015, Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Roth introduces the field to novices. The book provides a viable opportunity for social justice researchers to quickly familiarize themselves with some of the most relevant results of market design research before consulting the more technical literature that largely relies on game theory. …