Economic Systems Design

In 1992 the Cassini mission destined for Saturn was preparing to transport dozens of scientific exploration instruments with a constrained budget and limited resources. Each team of engineers and scientists was competing for resources (mass, energy, data transmission, etc.) against the other teams. When the Jet Propulsion Laboratory from NASA contacted a team of economists to help them design a mechanism that would ease the allocation, one of the economists immediately replied: “Let them trade.” Facing the trivially correct answer, the engineers insisted: “Could you be a little more specific?”