I utilize a mechanism design framework to show that the current most
popular practice in the timeshare exchange industry can be greatly
improved without a tremendous change in their fundamental systems. By
focusing on the ten-billion dollar timeshare industry and proposing a
superior mechanism to improve its operation, the research has
signi-ficant substantive implications. At the same time, from the
theoretical perspective, the research extends the literature on
one-sided matching to cases where supply of resources is dynamic and
resources can be stored. I also study the theoretical relationship
between two impor-tant matching mechanisms: Top Trading Cycles (TTC)
mechanism and Top Trading Cycles and Chains (TTCC) mechanism. I show
that given a specific chain selection rule of TTCC, it can be reduced to
TTC. How-ever, this applies to only one special case and do not
generalize to cases where other types of chain selection rules are used.
Given the obvious link between the mechanism design work and the
business systems that we observe in the marketplace, one of the
potential contributions of my research is to encourage mechanism design
study in management science.