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A Market-Based Mechanism for Allocating Space Shuttle Secondary Payload Priority

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

John Ledyard ,
David Porter  and
Randii Wessen
John Ledyard
Affiliation:
Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 9H25
David Porter
Affiliation:
Economic Science Laboratory, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721
Randii Wessen
Affiliation:
Systems Division, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA 91109
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Abstract

This is an investigation into the design of a market-based process to replace NASA's current committee process for allocating Shuttle secondary payload resources (lockers, Watts and crew). The market-based process allocates budgets of tokens to NASA internal organizations that in turn use the budget to bid for priority for their middeck payloads. The scheduling algorithm selects payloads by priority class and maximizes the number of tokens bid to determine a manifest. The results of a number of controlled experiments show that such a system tends to allocate resources more efficiently by guiding participants to make resource and payload tradeoffs. Most participants were able to improve their position over NASA's current ranking system. Furthermore, those that are better off make large improvements while the few that do worse have relatively small losses.

Keywords

mechanism designauctionsscheduling

JEL classification

C92: Laboratory, Group Behavior
Type
Research Article
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 2 , Issue 3 , March 2000 , pp. 173 - 195
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 Economic Science Association

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