But what did getting a "fair deal" have to do with the market designers' theory of the crisis? At most it seemed only to address the issue of whether one could consider the price generated to be a legitimate "market" price—a matter that really could not be settled by an experiment, anyhow. This was a far different claim than the one they had originally made to the Treasury: in their initial submission, Ausubel and Cramton argued not for the aggregation ability of markets in general, but instead for a very specific kind of "clock auction."

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 863