Research

The nature of markets has been fundamentally transformed by information technology. The path from demand for exchanges to creating a marketplace is now shorter than ever. At the same time, there is growing demand for marketplaces that address complex transactions, building on computational power. This technological evolution offers unprecedented control over market design, implementation, and operations.

The Stanford Center for Computational Market Design brings together an interdisciplinary team with expertise spanning algorithm design, economics, machine learning, and operations research, focused on tackling timely market challenges. It emphasizes an interdisciplinary approach, combining algorithms, economic theory, and empirical tools towards insightful market designs that consider operational intricacies and technological constraints. This includes understanding the source of market frictions and designing the rules of the market to increase efficiency, as well as simplifying and enhancing strategic considerations for different stakeholders.

Scholars of this center seek to address timely market design challenges. They bring extensive experience in shaping the design of marketplaces and platforms in various domains, including (among others) education, environment, health, labor, spectrum, and transportation.