Seminar – Augmenting Markets with Mechanisms

Professor Darrell Duffie, Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business

We model a market in which traders lay off their excess inventories of an asset in a sequence of size-discovery sessions and on a continuously operating exchange. Taking the exchange as given, we derive a size-discovery mechanism that efficiently reallocates the asset across traders at each session. Between sessions, in a dynamic exchange double- auction market, traders strategically lower their price impacts by shading their bids, causing socially costly delays in rebalancing the asset across traders. As the expected frequency of size-discovery sessions is increased, exchange market depth is further lowered, offsetting the efficiency gains of the size-discovery sessions. Adding size-discovery sessions to the exchange market has no social value, beyond that of a potential initialising session. If, as in practice, size-discovery sessions rely on price information from the exchange to set the terms of trade, then bidding incentives are further weakened, strictly reducing overall market efficiency.

Speaker bio

Darrell Duffie is the Dean Witter Distinguished Professor of Finance at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. He is a Fellow and member of the Council of the Econometric Society, a Research Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the board of directors of Moody’s Corporation since 2008.

Duffie was the 2009 president of the American Finance Association. In 2014, he chaired the Market Participants Group, charged by the Financial Stability Board with recommending reforms to Libor, Euribor, and other interest rate benchmarks.

Duffie’s recent books include How Big Banks Fail (Princeton University Press, 2010), Measuring Corporate Default Risk (Oxford University Press, 2011), and Dark Markets (Princeton University Press, 2012).