Market Design in the Age of AI, this Friday at Stanford

 Market Design in the Age of AI
Friday, February 27, 2026 , 12:00pm - 6:00pm PST
Simonyi Conference Center, CoDa, 389 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305

The Market Design in the Age of AI Conference aims to catalyze interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation at the intersection of algorithm design, economics, machine learning, and operations research. As market platforms become increasingly complex and data-driven, this conference brings together leading thinkers from both academia and industry to explore how AI is reshaping the design, analysis, and regulation of modern markets.

Our goal is to foster a vibrant community that bridges research and practice—advancing both the theory and real-world application of intelligent, efficient, and equitable market systems. Over time, we envision the conference serving as a launch pad for novel marketplaces and platform innovations that emerge from these collaborations.

Agenda (draft)

Start Time	End Time	Session	Speaker(s)
12:00 PM	1:00 PM	Lunch & Registration
1:00 PM	1:15 PM	Opening Remarks	Amin Saberi, Professor of Management Science & Engineering, Stanford; Computational Market Design Center Director
1:15 PM	1:45 PM	Economic Mechanisms in the GenAI Era: Advertising Auctions and Marketplaces	Aranyak Mehta, Distinguished Research Scientist, Google
1:45 PM	2:15 PM	Carpooling and the Economics of Self-Driving Cars	Michael Ostrovsky, Professor of Economics, Stanford Graduate School of Business
2:15 PM	3:00 PM	GenAI for Markets	Amine Allouah, My Custom AI, Custom AI James Biggs, Sr. Director of Marketplace Ads & Monetization Products, Upwork Yossi Feinberg, Professor of Economics, Stanford Graduate School of Business Negin (Nikki) Golrezaei, Theresa Seley Associate Professor in Management Science, MIT Ruben Lobel, Product Data Scientist Lead, Waymo Okke Schrijvers, Research Scientist Manager, Meta
3:00 PM	3:15 PM	Break
3:15 PM	3:45 PM	TBA	Vahab Mirrokni, VP & Fellow, Google Research
3:45 PM	4:15 PM	Fireside Chat: The Economics of AI	Michael Schwarz, Corporate Vice President & Chief Economist, Microsoft Guido Imbens, Professor, Stanford University; Faculty Director, Stanford Data Science Amin Saberi, Professor of Management Science & Engineering, Stanford; Computational Market Design Center Director
4:15 PM	4:45 PM	TBA	Ronnie Chatterji, OpenAI Chief Economist; Duke University Professor of Business & Public Policy
4:45 PM	5:00 PM	Closing Remarks
5:00 PM	6:20 PM	Networking Reception & Posters	View the Poster Map

 

Organizers

• Negin (Nikki) Golrezaei, MIT/Stanford
• Amin Saberi, Stanford

Poster Session Committee

• Mohammad Asadi, HAI Graduate Fellow
• Grace Guan, SDS Alumna (PhD in Management Science and Engineering)
• Andy Haupt, HAI Postdoctoral Fellow

Stanford celebrates 100 years of GSB

 GSB at 100: A Century of Impact, by Michael McDowell  interviews leading faculty members including

"Susan Athey: The GSB has had so many impacts, but let me just pick one particular issue that’s close to my heart, which is that it’s been several times in its history, it’s really been on the frontier of important ideas. One of the big ideas in the group that I’m in was market design and the use of formal strategic thinking and game theory and information economics to understand real phenomena. And Bob Wilson, who’s one of the grandfathers of the group that I sit in, Economics, he worked with oil companies in 1960s and looked at their bidding data and then developed formal theories that helped understand what was going wrong in those markets and how to fix it. And then later, he advised one of my advisors, Paul Milgrom, and they shared the Nobel Prize for some of their work on market design.

"And so, there’s many different takes on that, but one of my takes was that there was the connection to the world and the fact that the problem they were solving was coming out of a real problem leading to cutting edge theory that then created a field that didn’t exist. More recently, we were on the cutting edge of using machine learning for decision problems and what’s called causal inference, formally, and now Stanford is the best place in the world to do this kind of research. To go from zero in 2012 to best in the world with multiple amazing young scholars doing cutting edge research in 12 years is really stunning. And the GSB really supported us in that endeavor.

"So I think the GSB has been a really fabulous place for helping us stay grounded and really connected to real problems, but also allowing us to hire the kind of talent and giving us the space to do the pure research that doesn’t just solve today’s practical problems, but that actually builds the foundation for many people to solve applied problems."

Upcoming SITE summer seminars at Stanford

Program Overview

• Session 1: Asset Pricing: Models, Solution Methods, and Applications (June 30-July 2, 2025)
• Session 2: Empirical Implementation of Theoretical Models of Strategic Interaction and Dynamic Behavior (July 17-July 18, 2025)
• Session 3: The Economics of Transparency (July 24-July 25, 2025)
• Session 4: Causes and Consequences of Misallocation: Theory and Empirics (July 24-July 25, 2025)
• Session 5: Climate Finance and Banking (July 28-July 29, 2025)
• Session 6: Missing Markets (July 30-July 31, 2025)
• Session 7: Empirical Market Design (August 6-August 7, 2025)
• Session 8: Market Failures and Public Policy (August 7-August 8, 2025)
• Session 9: Dynamic Games, Contracts, and Markets (August 11-August 13, 2025)
• Session 10: Political Economic Theory (August 14-August 15, 2025)
• Session 11: Gender (August 14-August 15, 2025)
• Session 12: Psychology and Economics (August 18-August 19, 2025)
• Session 13: Experimental Economics (August 20-August 21, 2025)
• Session 14: Financial Regulation (August 25-August 27, 2025)
• Session 15: China in the Global Economy (August 27-August 29, 2025)
• Session 16: The Micro and Macro of Labor Markets (August 28-August 29, 2025)
• Session 17: The Macroeconomics of Uncertainty and Volatility (September 3-September 5, 2025)
• Session 18: Inequality Through the Lens of Individual and Labor Market Dynamics (September 4-September 5, 2025)
• Session 19: Macroeconomics in the Sequence Space (September 8-September 10, 2025)
• Session 20: Fiscal Sustainability (September 11-September 12, 2025)

Upcoming Sessions

Session 5: Climate Finance and Banking

Date

Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 9:30am - Tue, Jul 29, 2025, 1:00pm PDT

Location:

Landau Economics Building, 579 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305

This is a segment exploring the latest papers in climate finance and banking.

Session 6: Missing Markets

Date

Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 8:45am - Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 2:10pm PDT

Location:

Landau Economics Building, 579 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305

In low-income countries, many markets, including credit, insurance, land and information, are frictional or missing altogether.

Session 7: Empirical Market Design

Date

Wed, Aug 6, 2025, 8:00am - Thu, Aug 7, 2025, 5:00pm PDT

Location:

Day 1 & Morning of Day 2, Aug. 6-7: Stanford Graduate School of Business, 655 Knight Way, Stanford, CA 94305

Afternoon of Day 2, Aug. 7: Landau Economics Building, 579 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305

Empirical Market Design is an emerging research field, blending the theoretical underpinnings of market design with novel empirical approaches that are sometimes related to those used applied…

Session 8: Market Failures and Public Policy

Date

Thu, Aug 7, 2025, 8:00am - Fri, Aug 8, 2025, 1:30pm PDT

Location:

Landau Economics Building, 579 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305

Market failures are present in many markets, and governments throughout the world design interventions to address them.

Session 9: Dynamic Games, Contracts, and Markets

Date

Mon, Aug 11, 2025, 8:30am - Wed, Aug 13, 2025, 5:15pm PDT

Location:

Stanford Graduate School of Business, M109, 655 Knight Way, Stanford, CA 94305

The idea of this session is to bring together microeconomic theorists working on dynamic games and contracts with more applied theorists working in macro, finance, organizational economics, and…

Session 10: Political Economic Theory

Date

Thu, Aug 14, 2025, 8:15am - Fri, Aug 15, 2025, 4:25pm PDT

Location:

Stanford Graduate School of Business, C102, 655 Knight Way, Stanford, CA 94305

This session will bring together researchers from political science and economics who apply economic theory to the study of politics.

Session 11: Gender

Date

Thu, Aug 14, 2025, 8:30am - Fri, Aug 15, 2025, 5:30pm PDT

Location:

Landau Economics Building, 579 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305

This workshop will be dedicated to research that studies how gender influences economic outcomes and decision making.

Session 12: Psychology and Economics

Date

Mon, Aug 18, 2025, 9:30am - Tue, Aug 19, 2025, 7:00pm PDT

Location:

John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Building, 366 Galvez Street, Stanford, CA 94305

This session will bring together researchers working on issues at the intersection of psychology and economics.

Session 13: Experimental Economics

Date

Wed, Aug 20, 2025, 9:30am - Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 6:30pm PDT

Location:

John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Building, 366 Galvez Street, Stanford, CA 94305

This workshop is dedicated to advances in experimental economics combining laboratory and field-experimental methodologies with theoretical and psychological insights on decision-making, strategic…

Session 14: Financial Regulation

Date

Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 8:00am - Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 5:00pm PDT

Location:

Landau Economics Building, 579 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305

This session discusses the latest advances in theoretical and empirical issues related to financial regulation, defined broadly.

Session 15: China in the Global Economy

Date

Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 8:00am - Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 5:00pm PDT

Location:

Stanford Graduate School of Business, 655 Knight Way, Stanford, CA 94305

This session invites scholars and policymakers to explore the multifaceted dimensions of China's evolving economy and its global interconnections.

Session 16: The Micro and Macro of Labor Markets

Date

Thu, Aug 28, 2025, 8:30am - Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 3:45pm PDT

Location:

Landau Economics Building, 579 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305

The idea of this session is to bring together labor economists and macroeconomists with interests in labor markets with two goals.

Session 17: The Macroeconomics of Uncertainty and Volatility

Date

Wed, Sep 3, 2025, 12:00pm - Fri, Sep 5, 2025, 12:00pm PDT

Location:

Landau Economics Building, 579 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305

The session will cover recent work on the causes and effects of changes in volatility and uncertainty in the aggregate economy, which is incredibly topical given the ongoing domestic and wider…

Session 18: Inequality Through the Lens of Individual and Labor Market Dynamics

Date

Thu, Sep 4, 2025, 8:00am - Fri, Sep 5, 2025, 5:00pm PDT

Location:

John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Building, 366 Galvez Street, Stanford, CA 94305

This sessions aims to bring together scholars, both young and established, in as diverse fields as labor economics, public economics, industrial organization, and macroeconomics, who are…

Session 19: Macroeconomics in the Sequence Space

Date

Mon, Sep 8, 2025, 12:30pm - Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 12:30pm PDT

Location:

Landau Economics Building, 579 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305

The past five years have seen an explosion of work in macroeconomics using the “sequence-space” approach to solving and analyzing models.

Session 20: Fiscal Sustainability

Date

Thu, Sep 11, 2025, 8:00am - Fri, Sep 12, 2025, 5:00pm PDT

Location:

Landau Economics Building, 579 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305

Several countries have now record high levels of public debt that are comparable to the ones inherited from WWII.

Coffee and science at Stanford

 Julio Elias is welcomed home by the Universidad del CEMA after a great visit to Stanford.

Julio Elías, Director del MAE, fue Tinker Visiting Professor en Stanford University [Julio Elías, Director of the MAE, was Tinker Visiting Professor at Stanford University]

Featured in the story is this photo of Stanford's weekly market design coffee.

Stanford celebrates the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory (and recalls university-government collaboration on science)

 Remember when universities and the Federal government collaborated on big science?

The bold bet that built a telescope

"When the first images from the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory were released on June 23, they marked a historic milestone for the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), a landmark 10-year campaign to map the southern sky with the world’s largest digital camera, set to begin full science operations later this year. 

"Today, Rubin is an $800 million observatory backed by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy (DOE). But two decades ago, it was little more than a vision without funding, a home, or agency support.

"That changed in 2003, when Stanford University and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory jointly launched the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), setting in motion a chain of events that helped bring the LSST to life." 

 

the digital camera...

AI assisted home buying and selling at Stanford

 Stanford's office of Faculty and Staff Housing is just now offering Stanford affiliated buyers and sellers the use of the suite of AI programs developed by the real estate startup HomeKey.

From FSH: "Homekey is the new, streamlined alternative to the traditional real estate model. Whether you are buying or selling, Homekey is a one-stop AI-based platform to help you manage the entire process, from searching for homes, valuing houses, evaluating disclosures, to finding contractors and inspectors in one  convenient location. It uses AI to help read the documents and make the search process simpler. 

"Currently Homekey is an optional free service for Stanford Non-Restricted Ground Leased properties, working together with Stanford Faculty Staff Housing office and can be used with or without a real estate agent." 

From Homekey: "Homekey is the new, streamlined alternative to the traditional real estate model.
Learn more about our one-stop AI-based platform to help you manage the entire process here.
We are launching our service on 02.07.2025 "

Redesigning the Economics major(s) at Stanford

 At many universities, the undergraduate major in Economics serves several distinct groups of students.  There are students who might want to go on to graduate work in economics, students seeking jobs in business or government or NGOs that require analytical skills, students who would have chosen a Business major if one were available, and students who want to be capable of understanding articles in the WSJ and being thoughtful about public policy.  In general, departments have adopted the view that an education in econ is good for all these groups, from future economists to future educated citizens.

But not all of those groups are equally well served by the same set of required courses.  So Stanford is now offering two different undergrad degrees in Economics.

 Stanford Report has the story

"Economics major expanded to better suit different career paths.
In addition to a Bachelor of Arts degree, the Department of Economics now offers a Bachelor of Science and certificates in several subfields."

 "The Department of Economics in the School of Humanities and Sciences has begun offering students the option of pursuing a Bachelor of Science degree, and the Bachelor of Arts program has been modified. Also, majors can now fine-tune their interests by pursuing certificates in business economics, environmental economics, data science, and finance.  

"One of the most popular majors at Stanford, economics serves a range of students, from those seeking social science insights into decision-making to those seeking specialized quantitative – or “quant” – skills for numbers-heavy careers in finance.

...

“We don’t need them to get through MATH 51 unless they are going in the direction of the more ‘quant’ jobs – in which case we actually want them to have more math,” said Bernheim, who is also director of undergraduate studies in the department. “We decided we could serve both groups better by changing the prerequisite for the BA degree.” 

"Consequently, the new BS pathway’s core requirements, which are more quantitative than the BA’s, include MATH 115: Functions of a Real Variable; STATS 117: Theory of Probability; CS 106B: Programming Abstractions; and math-intensive economics courses on topics such as econometrics and game theory.

...

"Students on either degree path also can now obtain certificates in four areas: business economics, data science, environmental economics, and finance. The certificates allow students to narrow their focus within the major and signal to prospective employers that they’ve learned specific skill sets."

Course allocation at Stanford

 The Stanford Daily has the story:

New course enrollment system proposed to decrease stress and increase equity

"An alternative enrollment system called Griffin could allow students to submit proposed class schedules during a one-to-two week window.

"Griffin, presented by computer science professor Philip Levis at the Undergraduate Senate’s (UGS) Wednesday meeting, would replace the current system in which many students attempt to enroll in classes at the same time.

"The system’s proposed algorithm, called Approximate Competitive Equilibrium from Equal Incomes (A-CEEI), would process submitted courses and return final schedules within 48 hours. Levis says Griffin would prevent system crashes, increase equity and improve the experience of course enrollment.

“It’s strategy-proof, so there’s no way to game the system,” Levis said. “It reduces stress. There’s no time limit you have to submit in, no rush to submit in your time window. You just submit and you know it’s going to be fair.”

"Paul Nuyujukian M.D. ’12 Ph.D. ’14, assistant professor of bioengineering and a member of the Committee on Academic Computing and Information Systems (C-ACIS), said that 10% of Stanford courses are “oversubscribed,” meaning that enrollment is more than 95% of the classes’ capacity. According to Nuyujukian, a quarter of these classes have enrollments that exceed the enrollment cap.

...

"In contrast to the current scramble for courses, timing would have no impact on enrollment outcomes."

California Bans Legacy Admissions at Private Universities.

 The NYT has the story:

California Bans Legacy Admissions at Private Universities. The change will affect Stanford University, the University of Southern California and other private colleges in the state. By Shawn Hubler and Soumya Karlamangla, Sept. 30, 2024

"California will ban private colleges and universities, including some of the nation’s most selective institutions, from giving special consideration to applicants who have family or other connections to the schools, a practice known as legacy admissions.

"Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation on Monday that will prohibit the practice starting in the fall of 2025.

...

"The University of California, the California State University System and other public California campuses have banned legacy admissions for decades. But private colleges continued to give some preference to the descendants of alumni or major donors.

...

"Only one other state, Maryland, bans legacy preferences at both private and public institutions. Illinois, Virginia and Colorado ban legacy admissions, but only at public universities and colleges.
...

"After the Varsity Blues scandal in 2019, in which parents seeking to win spots in top-ranked schools for their children were found to have paid bribes and falsified their children’s credentials, Mr. Ting tried to push through a bill banning legacy preferences in California. That effort fell short.

"But he did succeed with a measure requiring private colleges to report to the Legislature how many students they admit because of ties to alumni or donors. Those reports showed that the practice was most widespread at Stanford and U.S.C., where, at both schools, about 14 percent of students who were admitted in the fall of 2022 had legacy or donor connections. At Santa Clara University, Mr. Newsom’s alma mater, 13 percent of admissions had such ties.

"Republicans as well as Democrats in the California Legislature voted for Mr. Ting’s latest proposal, which will punish institutions that flout the law by publishing their names on a California Department of Justice website. An earlier version had proposed that schools face civil penalties for violating the law, but that provision was removed in the State Senate."

Olympic scorekeeping (choose your comparison set)

 There are many local angles to the coverage of the Olympics. Some of them have to do with scoring systems.  Here's a story from the WSJ that counts medals in a way that's familiar where I live...

Which College Won the Olympics?  At the Paris Games, there were medalists from more than 100 schools. But there was one college that outperformed most countries—again. By Ben Cohen, Andrew Beaton,  and  Joshua Robinson

"When the Paris Olympics ended on Sunday, the final medal table looked exactly the way that everyone around the world expected. Team USA was once again at the top, followed by China, Great Britain, host France, Australia, Japan, Italy—and Stanford. 

...

"Stanford took home 39 medals, more than double the number of any other U.S. school—and more than the Netherlands, South Korea, Germany and Canada. ...

Harvard did well too:

"The eggheads from Cambridge, Mass., might not be known for starring in mainstream sports, but they thrive once every four years, when fencing, rowing and triathlon become the focus of global attention. This year, Harvard won 13 medals because the Crimson also came up big on the track, where sprinter Gabby Thomas blasted her way to three golds, and on two wheels, as cyclist Kristen Faulkner took gold in the women’s road race and the velodrome. "

Theory brunch at Stanford

 A Sunday brunch to welcome Fuhito Kojima back for a summer visit brought together an eclectic group of Stanford theorists, past, present, and future. (Mike Ostrovsky, Mohammad Akbarpour and Bob Wilson had already run off before things settled down for this picture  of Fuhito Kojima, Ilya Segal, Itai Ashlagi, Jason Hartline, Ravi Jagadeesan, Oguzhan Celebi, Roberto Corrao, and Frank Yang.)

Danny Kahneman, remembered by Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences

 Daniel Kahneman, 1934-2024: Nobel Prize Winner & CASBS Legend

"Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel laureate, professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University, and among the most distinguished and consequential cognitive and behavioral scientists of the past half-century, passed away on March 27, 2024. He was 90.

"Daniel Kahneman was a CASBS fellow during the 1977-78 academic year, occupying office (called “studies” at CASBS) #6. (Notably, this remarkable class included two other future Nobel Prize winners – Oliver Williamson (2009) and Robert B. Wilson (2020) – as well as future Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.)

"Kahneman’s 1977-78 year is legendary for two reasons. First, it is here, at CASBS, where Kahneman and his principal collaborator of nearly a decade, Amos Tversky – who had a visiting appointment at Stanford University’s psychology department that year[1] – completed a paper they painstakingly had been working on for years: “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk.” The paper, published in March 1979 in the journal Econometrica, is a landmark in the annals of the social sciences. The paper presents a direct challenge to standard expected utility theory through the concept of loss aversion, describing how economic agents assess prospective losses and gains in an asymmetric manner. In other words, people frame transactions or outcomes in their minds subjectively, affecting the value (or utility) they expect to receive.

...

"Though Kahneman himself had expressed it in various ways over the years, he put it crisply in 2016:

"CASBS is where behavioral economics took shape. When Richard Thaler heard that Amos Tversky and I would be in Stanford, he finagled a visiting appointment down the hill to spend time with us. We spent a lot of time walking around the Center and became lifelong friends. Those long conversations that Dick had with Amos and me helped him construct his then heretical (and now well-established) view of economics, by using psychological observations to explain violations of standard economic theory.[5]

***********

Earlier:

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Danny Kahneman (1934-2024)

Stanford SITE, summer 2024 schedule

 SITE 2024

Stanford Economics is proud to host its annual Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics (SITE) conference from July 1 to September 11, 2024, on the Stanford campus with sessions on a broad range of economic topics – bringing together established and emerging scholars to present leading-edge economic research, to educate, and to collaborate. 

Program Overview:

• Session 1: Gender (July 1-July 2, 2024)
• Session 2: Empirical Implementation of Theoretical Models of Strategic Interaction and Dynamic Behavior (July 11-July 12, 2024)
• Session 3: Trade and Finance (July 25-July 26, 2024)
• Session 4: Fiscal Sustainability (August 1-August 2, 2024)
• Session 5: Dynamic Games, Contracts, and Markets (August 5-August 7, 2024)
• Session 6: The Micro and Macro of Labor Markets (August 6-August 7, 2024)
• Session 7: Political Economic Theory (August 8-August 9, 2024)
• Session 8: Market Design (August 8-August 9, 2024)
• Session 9: Market Failures and Public Policy (August 14-August 15, 2024)
• Session 10: Empirical Market Design (August 15-August 16, 2024)
• Session 11: Climate Finance and Banking (August 19-August 20, 2024)
• Session 12: Frontiers of Macroeconomic Research (August 21-August 23, 2024)
• Session 13: Experimental Economics (August 22-August 23, 2024)
• Session 14: Psychology and Economics (August 26-August 27, 2024)
• Session 15: The Labor Market Experience of Vulnerable Populations of Workers (August 26-August 26, 2024)
• Session 16: Housing and Urban Economics (August 28-August 30, 2024)
• Session 17: The Macroeconomics of Uncertainty and Volatility (September 4-September 6, 2024)
• Session 18: New Research in Asset Pricing (September 4-September 6, 2024)
• Session 19: The Economics of Transparency (September 5-September 6, 2024)
• Session 20: Financial Regulation (September 9-September 11, 2024)