Billions of dollars in digital advertising are allocated every day through auctions that most firms don’t fully understand. Small changes in auction design, such as how quality scores are calculated or how bids are ranked, can shift millions in revenue between advertisers, the platform, and consumers. At the same time, platforms like Uber combine pricing and matching algorithms to decide which driver gets which rider and at what price. Often competitive advantage comes not from better products, but from a deeper understanding of how markets are designed. This course exposes students to a unified framework to understand and design markets using three tools: platform strategy (how multi-sided markets create and capture value), auction theory (how competition determines prices and allocation), and market design (how rules, matching, and information shape outcomes). As a second-year elective, the course assumes students already carry the functional grounding built in Terms 1–3 (economics, strategy, analytics, research methods) and pushes them to apply it at a mastery level to a single, coherent set of platform and market-design problems, culminating in an applied group project.
- Faculty: Sayan Chowdhury