The details of the auction design could make or break the Treasury's plan to invest $700 billion in mortgage-related securities to resolve the financial crisis, using market mechanisms such as reverse auctions to determine prices, according to Lawrence M. Ausubel and Peter Cramton.

On Tuesday, 10 February 2009, Treasury Secretary Geithner proposed the aggregator bank ("public-private investment fund") as a key instrument to resolve the financial crisis. He left out many details, so Lawrence Ausubel and Peter Cramton explain how an aggregator bank might operate in practice,...

Fears of pricing troubled assets have needlessly stalled the rescue effort, according to Lawrence Ausubel and Peter Cramton, two market-design economists whose work on TARP has received the attention of the Treasury and policy makers.