Market Engineering: Using Economics and Big Data to Render the "Invisible Hand" Visible
Event Details
Electronic marketplaces clear trillions of dollars worth of transactions. Google processes 40,000 search queries per second by running ad auctions for search keywords. Online shopping, auctions, and dating have become facts of life. How are such marketplaces designed? Mathematical models underlie the algorithms powering many of these marketplaces, and massive amounts of data allow "market engineers" to make their marketplaces more efficient, but such data also leads to complex computational challenges. In his talk, Ali Hortaçsu will outline some of these economic principles and provide some examples of them at work.
$20 General Admission, $10 Recent Graduates (College alumni of the past ten years and graduate alumni of the past five years).
Program
2:00 PM-2:45 PM: Registration and Reception
2:45 PM-4:00 PM: Presentation and Discussion
Speaker Profiles
Ali Hortaçsu (Speaker)
Ralph and Mary Otis Isham Professor of Economics and the College at the University of Chicago
Ali Hortaçsu is the Ralph and Mary Otis Isham Professor of Economics and the College at the University of Chicago. He is one of the first economists to systematically study online marketplaces to improve their efficiency; he has published widely and is currently coeditor of the Journal of Political Economy. A fellow of the Econometric Society and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Hortaçsu has engaged in research with Google, Microsoft, and the US Department of Treasury.