Market Design

Catalog description

Market design is broadly about designing interventions in economic systems so as to enhance their performance. The power and potential of market design has recently entered a new era of possibility with the rise of Artificial Intelligence. Artificial Intelligence is concerned with the design of intelligent autonomous systems. Such systems are rapidly transforming our society and economy and have been enabled by major advances in cloud computing and network telecommunications. Yet underlying the technological surface of many AI-oriented applications are fundamental economic and econometric principles which are central to their design and implementation. In short, to perform well, an AI system must "think like economists" - it must: 1. Make predictions about its environment; 2. Test causal hypotheses about the effect of various actions they can take, and; 3. Make decisions about an optimal plan of action in the face of uncertainty, which is a cycle that repeats and iteratively improves. Many of the established success stories in AI today have largely been focused on achieving (1), the trend is towards AI increasingly encompassing (2) and (3). In this course we aim to isolate these economic principles and understand their role in the modern development of AI, as well as gaining an appreciation for what the proliferation of AI based technologies means for the economy in which we live. Although the course will be principally interested in the former, we won't fully shy away from some discussion of the latter. Topics include human judgment and decision making biases (a light intro to behavioral economics), predictive machine learning and regularization, causal inference as distinct from prediction with application to product pricing, and reinforcement learning for dynamic decisions.