With the labor landscape facing transformative changes including a decline in the working population—due to the declining birthrate and population aging—and changes in job-hunting rules, improving the labor market through institutional design is becoming an urgent issue.
Education
Project#2
Education is, needless to say, crucial to modern societies, and an important research theme at UTMD is that of examining how scarce educational resources can be distributed as efficiently and as fairly as possible.
Japan experiences a high rate of natural disasters, including earthquakes and flooding, and it is further out on the curve than any other country in terms of population aging and birthrate decline, and this is making its various systems related to disasters, medical care, and nursing care all the more important.
The notion of having the right person in the right place is central to market design, and creating systems that will hold up in practical applications is essential if the right resources are to be allocated to the right people. In real-world applications, for example, figuring out how to combine people and other resources is a mathematical problem that needs to be solved within a realistic time frame, and knowledge of computer science is essential in accomplishing this. For this reason, UTMD aims for a truly organic fusion of ideas at a high level through interdisciplinary collaboration not only with traditional economics but also with relevant fields such as computer science.
The results of our market design research aid in the design of institutions to solve a variety of problems around the world. In specific terms, our process is to (1) conduct a detailed study of existing circumstances and practices to (2) identify key points from a theoretical standpoint, (3) develop theoretical solutions to the problems present, and then (4) run computer simulations that guide us in (5) creating a small pilot implementation, with the ultimate aim being to (6) develop a working, full-scale implementation. We also develop software that users can customize to an extent suit their needs, which we also make available as a Web service.
UTMD regularly organizes seminars and conferences primarily for researchers. We also plan to periodically hold symposia aimed at a more general audience in an effort to spread awareness and understanding of market design.
UTMD is looking for partners to work on social implementations that make use of our research findings. Please contact us if you are interested in working with us on an implementation project, or if you would like us to implement research-supported mechanisms in your organization.