b. I replaced the system with the following: Aside from some key assignments of graduate students as TAs to large courses, I no longer assigned any students to faculty. Instead, I asked the faculty to submit dollar bids for the right to match with a graduate student. If we had N graduate students available, I then took the top N bids, let those faculty know they had qualified for the right to match with a student and then let the matches take place (with students and faculty seeking each other out to create matches). Every faculty member who had a successful bid was then charged (to his/her research account) a price equal to the lowest winning bid, which we called the “market price.” (Students were still paid by the department as before. The charges to faculty accounts simply came into the chair discretionary account and were then redistributed in a lump sum way to all faculty.) Given that we have a large number of faculty, should any individual faculty member think that his/her bid would appreciably impact the “market price”?