Overview

About the program

Contemporary electronically mediated platforms for market-level and individual exchange combine complex human decisions with intensive computation and data processing, all operating within an engineered economic environment. Examples include: online markets, crowdsourcing platforms, spectrum auctions, financial platforms, crypto currencies, and large scale matching/allocation systems such as kidney exchange and public school choice systems. These platforms encompass a growing slice of economic activity and are shifting the scope and efficiency of market and non-market exchanges.

Some forms of exchange that were simply infeasible due to coordination or information frictions (centralized kidney exchange, vehicle sharing) are suddenly available and important. Other market activities that were previously thought to require centralization and oversight, can now be decentralized and self-regulated (crypto-currency being the leading example), and the technology beneath that decentralization (so-called blockchain) will have many further critical applications. 

This emerging sphere of technological and economic activity draws expertise from three academic disciplines: computer science, economics, and data science, disciplines studied in the Computer Science, Economics, and Data Science program of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Computer science supplies the procedures and algorithms on which these technologies operate. Data science structures, parses, and interprets the vast set of informational inputs and outputs that move through these platforms. Economics guides the design of platforms, predicts and interprets their emergent properties, and sets the incentives faced by market actors to generate desirable outcomes (e.g., efficiency, transparency, incentive compatibility, public goods provision).