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Sixth Marketplace Innovation Workshop (MIW)

The conference will be virtual

May 24-27, 2021 (10:45am EST - 2:45pm EST)

Registration

ENTER the workshop virtual venue

Click here for program

Organizers

Itai Ashlagi, Management Science and Engineering, Stanford University
Omar Besbes, Columbia Business School, Columbia University
Nicole Immorlica, Microsoft Research
Gabriel Weintraub, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University
Fanyin Zheng, Columbia Business School, Columbia University

Description

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, Upwork, etc.
  • Procurement markets, such as technology-enabled government procurement
  • Health care exchanges
  • Financial exchanges

Plenary speakers

The workshop will have several invited distinguished plenary speakers from academia and industry, including:

  • Hunt Allcott, Microsoft Research
  • Sinan Aral, MIT
  • Nikhil Devanur, Amazon
  • Ramesh Johari, Stanford University
  • Ilan Lobel, New York University
  • Vahideh Manshadi, Yale University
  • Daniela Saban, Stanford University
  • Catherine Tucker, MIT

Workshop format

The workshop will be virtual and will run every day from 10:45am EST to 2:45pm EST from May 24 to May 27, 2021. Click here for program
The workshop, while virtual, will take place on an interactive platform that aims at replicating as much as possible a live conference environment. The conference will take place in a virtual space with various rooms for talks, and halls for poster sessions and small, self-formed, group discussions. Every participant will have an avatar, and will be able to navigate from one space to the other, run into colleagues in the halls, and have spontaneous conversations/encounters. If you would like to familiarize yourself with the space beforehand, you may navigate the venue.

Submissions

Submissions are now closed.

Registration

Register here
The Marketplace Innovations Workshop will be run by Virtual Chair in a virtual environment that you navigate with an avatar.

Past workshops

In past years, the workshop was co-located with the Revenue Management and Pricing Conference. This year, with the virtual format, the two conferences will take place at different times.

Programs of past years of the workshop can be found here: