High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! A "smart market" is a periodic auction which is cleared by the operations research technique of mathematical optimization, such as linear programming. The smart market is operated by a market manager. Trades are not bilateral, between pairs of people, but rather to or from a pool. A smart market can assist market operation when trades would otherwise have significant transaction costs or externalities. Most other types of auctions can be cleared by a simple process of sorting bids from lowest to highest. Goods may be divisible, as with milk or flour, or indivisible, as with paintings or houses. Finding a market-clearing allocation corresponds to solution of a simple knapsack problem, and does not require much computation.