Monday, December 28, 2015

Open access to The Art of Designing Markets, in HBR

The Harvard Business Review (HBR) has a pretty high and well defended paywall, but they have made my October 2007 article, The Art of Designing Markets, freely available.
https://hbr.org/2007/10/the-art-of-designing-markets

Here's the first paragraph:
"Traditional economics views markets as simply the confluence of supply and demand. A new field of economics, known as “market design,” recognizes that well-functioning markets depend on detailed rules. For example, supply and demand drive both stock markets and labor markets, but someone who wants to buy or sell shares in a company goes through very different procedures from those followed by a job seeker or an employer. Moreover, labor markets work differently from one another: Doctors aren’t hired the way lawyers, professional baseball players, or new MBAs are. Market designers try to understand these differences and the rules and procedures that make various kinds of markets work well or badly. Their aim is to know the workings and requirements of particular markets well enough to fix them when they’re broken or to build markets from scratch when they’re missing."

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