About

James Schummer is an Associate Professor of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He joined Kellogg in 1997 after earning his PhD in Economics from the University of Rochester. His expertise lies in game theory, axiomatic resource allocation, and mechanism design, focusing on how organizations can design rules and systems that lead to better outcomes when individuals have their own incentives and private information. His research concentrates on allocating scarce resources effectively and strategically robust, exploring questions such as auction design for asset valuation, efficient reallocation of airport landing slots, pricing rules in digital platform matching markets, and structuring waiting lists or classification systems to balance fairness, efficiency, and incentives. More recently, he has studied how information should be allocated when privacy constraints are relevant. Professor Schummer has taught across various Kellogg programs, including the Full-Time MBA, Evening & Weekend MBA, Executive MBA, and PhD programs, regularly teaching Business Analytics and Managerial Economics, and has served as his department's Director of Graduate Studies for nearly two decades.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Microeconomics
• Economics
• Computer Security
• Business
• Statistics
• Mathematical economics
• Actuarial science
• Financial economics
• Finance
• Econometrics
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Sequential Preference Revelation in Incomplete Information Settings

  American Economic Journal Microeconomics · 2021 · 6 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Security
  • Economics

  Strategy-proof allocation rules incentivize truthfulness in simultaneous move games, but real world mechanisms sometimes elicit preferences sequentially. Surprisingly, even when the underlying rule is strategy-proof and nonbossy, sequential elicitation can yield equilibria where agents have a strict incentive to be untruthful. This occurs only under incomplete information, when an agent anticipates that truthful reporting would signal false private information about others’ preferences. We provide conditions ruling out this phenomenon, guaranteeing all equilibrium outcomes to be welfare-equivalent to truthful ones. (JEL C73, D45, D82, D83)

  PublisherDOI

• Revenue from matching platforms

  Theoretical Economics · 2021 · 9 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Economics
  • Microeconomics

  We consider the pricing problem of a platform that matches heterogeneous agents using match‐contingent fees. Absent prices, agents on the short side of such markets capture relatively greater surplus than those on the long side (Ashlagi et al. 2017). Nevertheless we show that the platform need not bias its price allocation toward either side. With independently drawn preferences, optimal price allocation decisions are independent of market size or imbalance; furthermore, changes in the optimal price level move both sides' prices in the same direction. In contrast, preference homogeneity biases price allocation in a direction that depends on the form of homogeneity; furthermore, changes in market imbalance move both sides' prices in opposite directions. These effects arise due to the exclusivity of matchings in two‐sided market settings.

  PublisherDOI

• Influencing waiting lists

  Journal of Economic Theory · 2021 · 24 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Microeconomics
  • Economics
  • Actuarial science
  PublisherDOI

• The Role of Characterizations in Market Design

  Studies in economic design · 2019-01-01 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Incentives in landing slot problems

  Journal of Economic Theory · 2017-04-18 · 40 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Assignment of Arrival Slots

  American Economic Journal Microeconomics · 2013-04-30 · 68 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Industry participants agree that, when inclement weather forces the FAA to reassign airport landing slots, incentives and property rights should be respected. We show that the FAA's Compression algorithm is incentive compatible, but fails to guarantee a form of property rights. This is significant since these conditions were the motivation for introducing Compression a decade ago. We give an alternative mechanism that does satisfy these conditions. It has the flavor of Top Trading Cycle variants of Abdulkadiroğlu and Sönmez (1999) and Pápai (2000) for related but distinct models. Finally, both mechanisms may fail another condition: the incentive to vacate unusable landing slots. (JEL D45, D82, L93, L98, P14, R41)

  PublisherDOI

• An Ascending Vickrey Auction for Selling Bases of a Matroid

  Operations Research · 2011-04-01 · 69 citations

  article

  Consider selling bundles of indivisible goods to buyers with concave utilities that are additively separable in money and goods. We propose an ascending auction for the case when the seller is constrained to sell bundles whose elements form a basis of a matroid. It extends easily to polymatroids. Applications include scheduling, allocation of homogeneous goods, and spatially distributed markets, among others. Our ascending auction induces buyers to bid truthfully and returns the economically efficient basis. Unlike other ascending auctions for this environment, ours runs in pseudopolynomial or polynomial time. Furthermore, we prove the impossibility of an ascending auction for nonmatroidal independence set-systems.

  PublisherDOI

• Almost-dominant Strategy Implementation

  Econstor (Econstor) · 2009-01-01 · 29 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Though some environments yield reasonable allocation rules that are implementable in dominant strategies (i.e., strategy-proof), a significant number yield impossibility results. On the other hand, while there are general possibility results for implementation in Nash or Bayesian equilibrium, these equilibrium concepts make strong assumptions about the players' knowledge. Since such assumptions may not be practical in various design scenarios, we formulate a solution concept built on one premise: Players who do not have much to gain by manipulating will not bother to do so. For an exchange economy model and a voting/lotteries model, we search for efficient rules that never provide players with large gains from manipulation. Though the rules we describe are inequitable, they are significantly more flexible than those that satisfy the stronger condition of strategy-proofness, even when the allowable gains from manipulation are made arbitrarily small. This demonstrates a type of non-robustness in previous impossibility results.

  Publisher

• Credible deviations from signaling equilibria

  International Journal of Game Theory · 2009-04-27 · 14 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Credible Deviations from Signaling Equilibria ⁄ (Final \Working Paper version")

  2008-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  In games with costly signaling, some equilibria are vulnerable to deviations which could be \unambiguously interpreted as coming from a unique set of Sender-types. This occurs when these types are precisely the ones who gain from deviating for any beliefs the Receiver could form over that set. We show that this idea characterizes a unique equilibrium outcome in two classes of games. First, in monotonic signaling games, only the Riley outcome is immune to this sort of deviation. Our result therefore provides a plausible story behind the selection made by Cho and Kreps’ (1987) D1 criterion on this class of games. Second, we examine a version of Crawford and Sobel’s (1982) model with costly signaling, where standard reflnements have no effect. We show that only a Riley-like separating equilibrium is immune to these deviations.

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Rakesh Vohra

  28 shared

• Sushil Bikhchandani

  14 shared

• Sven de Vries

  12 shared

• Péter Eső

  6 shared

• Noam Nisan

  Hebrew University of Jerusalem

  4 shared

• William Thomson

  University of Rochester

  3 shared

• Éva Tardos

  2 shared

• Rodrigo A. Velez

  2 shared