Economic Frontiers

EF3: Marketplace Design and Strategy w/ Greg Lewis

11.16.2015 - By MIT_IDEPlay

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Show notes: http://ide.mit.edu/news-events-media/podcasts/ef3-marketplace-design-and-strategy-w-greg-lewis

This podcast is about economic issues related to online marketplaces and platforms. We are joined by Greg Lewis, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, who is one of the leading experts in this new and growing field. Why have companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and eBay been hiring a lot of economists? We discuss the unique perspective that industrial organization economists have in using data to make strategic and market design decisions. We then discuss how the search ranking algorithm and other platform policies can be used as strategic tools to incentivize platform participants. Next, we talk about why it's difficult to measure the effects of changes to a platform even when experiments are possible. We then move on to a conversation about platform fees and the chicken and egg problem in platforms. Lastly, we discuss emerging issues such as competition in cloud computing.

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