INFORMS Comment on “Thirteen Reasons Why the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves Process is Not Practical ” by

Whenever a research topic which has developed in one field spreads to new disciplines, there is the potential benefit of new perspectives and new tools opening unexplored avenues, and there is the potential danger of re-learning the old lessons of the originating discipline. The spread of auction theory and, more generally, mechanism design to computer science, operations research, and related fields is certainly no exception. On one hand, important practical issues such as the computability of equilibria have long been ignored by the economics profession. On the other hand, computer scientists and operations researchers have focused almost exclusively on the dominant strategy mechanisms developed in the 1970s with no attention to the vast and elegant implementation literature of the 1980s and 1990s, much of which was developed with the focus of finding continually better mechanisms. For-tunately, cross-disciplinary discussions such as this can help both sides reap the benefits of progress without incurring the costs of repetition. My hope is that Michael Rothkopf’s critique of the VCG mechanism will lead non-economists interested in mechanism design to explore the implementation literature and to use new tools to generate additional useful insights.1 Much of the renewed interest in mechanism design has focused narrowly on auction design