Market Design meets User Interface Design

Electronic markets are becoming more and more pervasive in our lives, but only little is known about the role that user interfaces play for the efficiency of these markets. How does the way we display market information to end-users and the set of choices we offer them influence overall economic efficiency? In this talk, we introduce a new research agenda on “market user interfaces.” We propose a framework that models market users with cognitive costs that depend on the complexity of the market user interface. Based on this framework, we develop a general design methodology that takes users’ error profiles and optimizes the market user interface for real users.
We evaluate four design levers regarding their effect on economic
efficiency: the number of choices offered, fixed vs. changing market prices, situation-dependent choice sets, and choice sets that are optimized for users’ cognitive costs. We present preliminary results from an economics lab experiment involving 60 users, showing the importance of these design levers for electronic market design. Furthermore, we propose a novel market design that minimized users’
cognitive costs: instead of balancing the market via price updates, we keep prices fixed over time and hide the market from a subset of users, depending on current supply and demand.

Joint work with Kamal Jain, Eric Horvitz, Mary Czerwinski and Desney Tan

Speaker Details

Sven Seuken is a 5th year CS PhD candidate at Harvard University. His general research interests are at the intersection of economics and computer science. In his dissertation, Sven studies electronic market design, i.e. the application of mechanism design and game theory to electronic markets and systems. His particular focus is on designing markets for non-expert users for domains where markets might be unexpected or unnatural. He has worked on a market for a decentralized file storage system, a market for the allocation of bandwidth to smartphones, and on distributed work systems. He is a Fulbright scholar and a recipient of a Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship.

Date:
Speakers:
Sven Seuken
Affiliation:
Harvard University

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      Jeff Running