Thursday, September 10, 2015

My market design blog is 7 years old today

I have written over 3000 blog posts since starting this market design blog with Peter Coles seven years ago, in a post dated Sept 10, 2008.

A few posts have attracted more than usual traffic. One of these didn't say much, but lots of people checked out what I nevertheless managed to say in the early morning of  Oct 15, 2012. (That post probably got more comments than any other...) Some popular posts implicitly announced an impending move, either mine or someone else's (or several). (Some are hard to characterize but probably turn up in popular searches, like this post on doctor license plates.) Some refer to interesting markets, which may be interesting because they are repugnant. Some of my most viewed posts concerned small design changes to the market for new Ph.D. economists, on signaling and the scramble. Rosemarie Nagel's guessing game (later renamed "beauty contest) experiment is a perennial favorite (and here's more on that)..

"Repugnance" is the tag I have used most often to say what a post is about. Other tags I've used more than 100 times are (in alphabetical order) academic marketplace,  college admissions,  compensation for donors,  conference and conferences,  crime,  job market,  kidney exchange and kidneys,  market design and market designers,  matching,  papers,  school choice,  transplantation, and unraveling. A relatively new tag (first used in 2011) is video, which links to a variety of recorded lectures, interviews or news broadcasts, ranging from over an hour to just a few minutes.

One of my goals in starting a blog was to make a repository of market design things I wanted to remember--it has been reasonably successful at that. I also wanted it to be an adjunct to my teaching, and I think it has been reasonably successful in that as well, becoming a source of topics that students sometimes follow up on. And I wanted it to help disseminate the idea of market design to a wider audience, especially including (but not limited to) other economists. It's hard for me to judge how successful that has been, although I get the clear impression that the readership of the blog is vastly larger than the readership of my papers. (In that same vein, I have a book meant to make market design ideas accessible. It was published June 2,  and I've been chronicling my adventures connected with it under the tag WGWaW.)

At some point I got into the habit of posting something every day. I'm not committed to continuing that, but for now it is a (mostly early morning) routine that I still like.

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