Marketplace Innovation Workshop, Columbia U, June 10 2015

This looks like an exciting conference, I would go if I weren't already committed to be elsewhere...

"Marketplace Innovation" Workshop Conference Organized by Ramesh Johari, Costis Maglaras, and Gabriel Weintraub Wednesday, June 10, 2015 from 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM (EDT) New York, NY

Workshop on “Marketplace Innovation”

June 10, 2015

Columbia University

In conjunction with the 2015 Informs Revenue Management Conference

Organized by Ramesh Johari, Costis Maglaras, and Gabriel Weintraub

Markets are an ancient institution for matching the supply for a good or service with its demand. Physical markets were typically slow to evolve, with simple institutions governing trade, and trading partners generally facing a daunting challenge in finding the "right" partner.  The information technology revolution, however, has generated a sea of change in how markets function: now, markets are typically complex platforms, with a range of mechanisms involved in facilitating matches among participants.  Recent trends point to an unprecedented level of control over the design, implementation, and operation of markets: more than ever before, we are able to engineer the platforms governing transactions among market participants. As a consequence, market operators or platforms can control a host of variables such as pricing, liquidity, visibility, information revelation, terms of trade, and transaction fees. On its part, given these variables, market participants often face complex problems when optimizing their own decisions. In the supply side such decisions may include the assortment of products to offer and their price structure, while in the demand side they may include how much to bid for different goods and what feedback to offer about past purchasing experiences. The decisions made by the platform and the market participants interact, sometimes in intricate and subtle ways, to determine market outcomes.

In this workshop we seek work that improves our understanding of these markets, both from the perspective of the market operator and the market participants. With respect to the former we are particularly interested in work that derives useful insights on how to design these markets, taking into account their operational details and engineering and technological constraints. With respect to the market participants, we seek for work that introduces novel approaches to optimize their decisions and improves our understanding of their interactions within the market. We look for a mix of approaches including modeling, theoretical, and empirical, using a wide range of tools drawn from operations management, game theory, auctions and mechanism design, optimization stochastic modeling, revenue management, econometrics, or statistics.

The list of markets to be studied includes but it is not restricted to:

--Online marketplaces, such as eBay, Etsy, etc.

--Internet advertising, including sponsored search and display ad exchanges.

--Sharing economy markets, such as Uber/Lyft, AirBnb, etc.

--Online labor markets, such as Amazon mTurk, oDesk, Elance, etc.

--Procurement markets, such as technology-enabled government procurement

--Health care exchanges

--Financial exchanges

The talks are by invitation only and the list of confirmed speakers is:

• Gad Allon (Kellogg)
• Itai Ashlagi (MIT)
• Eric Budish (Chicago Booth)
• Gerard Cachon (Wharton)
• Anindya Ghose (NYU)
• Karan Girotra (INSEAD)
• Steve Graves (MIT)
• Nicole Immorlica (Microsoft)
• Hamid Nazerzadeh (USC)
• Christian Terwiesch (Wharton)
• Rakesh  Vohra (Penn)
• Assaf Zeevi (Columbia)

The program is here