How should we design society’s mechanisms to improve lives?

“How should we design society’s mechanisms to improve lives?” This is one of the most important questions people have been trying to solve since ancient times , and one for which we are yet to find an answer. Research into market design, a branch of economics, has been making great strides toward answering this question.
Market design is an interdisciplinary area of research building on collaborations among a variety of disciplines such as economics and computer science, which not only derive theoretically appealing solutions to society’s problems but also implement them in real life. Although many successful implementations have been achieved in practice around the world, not much has occurred in Japan so far. Our center aspires to change this. The center’s mission is to advance basic research, apply insights from that research in practical implementations, and use feedback from implementations to further advance basic research.
We look forward to hearing from you if you would like to collaborate with us or receive help on a problem. We welcome suggestions to work together on everyday problems—we are working on a variety of modern-day topics such as labor markets, the allocation of daycare and nursery school places, and disaster relief, as well as futuristic ones such as blockchain. Please consult our website if you are interested. And please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have a topic to discuss. We also welcome collaborations (joint research or implementation projects) as well as sponsorships (donations).

Fuhito Kojima, Director

 


Message from Professor Alvin Roth, Nobel Laureate in Economics

We received a congratulatory message from Professor Alvin Roth (Stanford University) at the launch of UTMD.

Market design is one of the most exciting fields of economics, and collaborations between researchers and practitioners have successfully improved quite a number of institutions in practice. I am thrilled about the new Market Design Center at Todai, because I know that Fuhito has all necessary abilities to make it work: he is among the most productive scholars in the world, and I am sure he will be an inspired and inspiring leader. I am looking forward to collaborating with him and his team at the Center for years to come.