Friday, December 8, 2023

Computers in Econ (and in market design)

 The current issue of the journal Œconomia. is devoted to The Computerization of Economics. Computers, Programming, and the Internet in the History of Economics

It includes this surprisingly grumpy-sounding take on market design, particularly on its intersection with game theory:

 Nik-Khah, Edward. "The Closed Market: Platform Design and the Computerization of Economics." Œconomia. History, Methodology, Philosophy 13-3 (2023): 877-905.

Here's a paragraph that caught my eye:

"In his book Who Gets What—And Why, the market designer Alvin Roth pronounced firms such as Google, Amazon, and Uber to be “markets,” proclaiming, “Successful designs depend greatly on the details of the market, including the culture and psychology of the participants” (Roth, 2015). One need not actually find an example of an economist counseling advisees to skip that additional course in game theory and take up cultural anthropology to arrive at the sense that matters had taken a surprising turn: only a decade before one regularly encountered brash claims that all social science worth its salt must be reducible to game theory, with market design cited as evidence for why this must be so (e.g., Binmore, 2004)."

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Here's the table of contents of the issue:

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