Mechanism designers had done no prior work on fixing a collapsing economy

Evidence

The dispute over auction forms raised a second, more serious problem: there was no good reason to believe that the auctions would do what the market designers had said they would: namely, summon a chain of events that would eventually bring the economy out of crisis by, in the first place, aggregating dispersed information. After all, no work had been done previously by market designers on how to fix a collapsing economy. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 858

Categorization

• SEED: An essay could explore why economists promoted auction designs for crisis rescue when the field had produced zero research on how to fix collapsing economies — the confidence gap between formal theory and urgent policy.