The MBA Course Auction System

The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Project: The Wharton school wanted to allocate courses to students via a series of multiple-round, discretely traded, sealed-bid auctions. The auctions were to be conducted entirely on the web using an in-house java application. They brought me into the project to help with the design.

Design Process

Through conversation it became clear that a poor understanding of the environment and user interactions hampered the design. Work had been done that determined the mechanism of the auction — e.g., how bids and asks would be matched, or how the price would be set. However, users' interactions with the system was unclear. Indeed, it was not yet clear who all the users would be. Of course, students would be primary users, but in what capacity? As it turned out, students had many different roles. They were buyers and sellers of course seats as well as market analysts as they observed changing positions of different courses over the course of the auction period. Similarly, we needed to determine the roles of teachers and administrators, and how they would interact with the system.

Given this confusion, I started by stepping back from the system's design to better understand the user interaction with the auction system. Through a dialectic process we created a UML model of:

• The actors and entities of the auction.
• Actors' interactions with the system and with each other through the system.
• The auction's processes.

With a clear interaction model, we then designed the system. This included the database ER and specifications for the necessary auction interfaces.

Results

The Course Auction was put into production in September 1997 for registration in all regular Wharton MBA courses. Since going into production, other universities have expressed interest in licensing the system.

In 1999 the system became a Computerworld-Smithsonian Innovation Award Laureate (The nomination was made by Sun Microsystems).

A tour of the Course Auction System is on line at http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/spike/auction/

Figure 1: The interface of the Wharton Course Auction System.