Justin Burkett
Associate Professor
Overview
Justin Burkett joined Georgia Tech as an Assistant Professor in August 2018. His research is in the area of microeconomic theory called market design, which studies the design of real-world market institutions that allocate goods as diverse as US Treasury Bonds and public school seats. The aim of Dr. Burkett's research and of the field more generally is to provide practical solutions for any deficiencies in existing institutions, usually related to the incentives implied by its current design. Dr. Burkett's work has appeared in academic journals such as Journal of Economic Theory, Theoretical Economics, and Experimental Economics.
Before joining Georgia Tech, he earned his PhD in Economics from the University of Maryland, College Park and was an Assistant Professor at Wake Forest University.
- Ph.D., University of Maryland
- B.A., Washington University in Saint Louis
- Game Theory
- Market Design, Auctions and Contract Theory
- Microtheory
- ECON-4180: Game Theory Economics
- ECON-4190: Econ of Strategy & Info
- ECON-7004: Math for Economists
- ECON-7013: Microeconomic Theory II
Selected Publications
Journal Articles
- Optimal Quantity Caps in Discriminatory Auctions with Resale
In: Theoretical Economics [Peer Reviewed]
Date: 2020
We present a model of a discriminatory price auction in which a large bidder competes against many small bidders, followed by a post‐auction resale stage in which the large bidder is endogenously determined to be a buyer or a seller. We extend results on first‐price auctions with resale to this setting and use these results to give a tractable characterization of equilibrium behavior. We use this characterization to study the policy of capping the amount that may be won by large bidders in the auction, a policy that has received little attention in the auction literature. Our analysis shows that the trade‐offs involved when adjusting these quantity caps can be understood in terms familiar to students of asymmetric first‐price single‐unit auctions. Furthermore, whether one seeks to maximize welfare or revenue can have contradictory implications for the choice of cap.
- Information Disclosure in Auctions with Downstream Competition
In: Economic Letters [Peer Reviewed]
Date: 2018
When bidders’ valuations are derived from a downstream market in which they may compete, the allocation to the firms with the lowest costs can differ from the allocation that maximizes the ex post valuations of the bidders. I consider the problem of auctioning two goods to bidders whose valuations for a good flexibly depend on their and their rival’s costs as well as the identity of the rival. I show that revealing the identities of winners through a sequential auction procedure leads to allocations in which bidders tend to have higher ex post valuations but also higher costs when compared to a simultaneous auction.
- Large Multi-Unit Auctions with a Large Bidder
In: Journal of Economic Theory [Peer Reviewed]
Date: 2018
We compare equilibrium bidding in uniform-price and discriminatory auctions when a single large bidder (i.e., with multi-unit demand) competes against many small bidders, each with single-unit demands. We show that the large bidder prefers the discriminatory auction over the uniform-price auction, and we provide general conditions under which small bidders have the reverse preference. We use examples to show that the efficiency and revenue rankings of the two auctions are ambiguous.
- Allocating Group Housing
In: Social Choice and Welfare [Peer Reviewed]
Date: November 2017
We study mechanisms for allocating objects to pairs of agents when agents may have nontrivial preferences over objects and pairings. In this environment, the mechanism may distort agents’ preferences over pairings. Compared to certain distortive mechanisms, a non-distortive one always has a stable allocation in our model, and selects stable outcomes that are ex ante preferred by all students under a regularity condition on the distribution of pair values.