You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

MarkL comments on [Sequence announcement] Introduction to Mechanism Design - Less Wrong Discussion

55 Post author: badger 30 April 2014 04:21PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (12)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: MarkL 01 May 2014 12:22:55PM 3 points [-]

Anyone do "mechanism design" in their day job? What are jobs that have aspects of this? (Besides implicitly, like every web startup ever, which is still interesting to think about.)

Comment author: badger 01 May 2014 01:17:15PM 4 points [-]

Aside from academic economists and computer scientists? :D Auction design has been a big success story, enough so that microeconomic theorists like Hal Varian and Preston McAfee now work at Google full time. Microsoft and other tech companies also have research staff working specifically on mechanism design.

As far as people that should have some awareness (whether they do or not): anyone implementing an online reputation system, anyone allocating resources (like a university allocating courses to students or the US Army allocating ROTC graduates to its branches), or anyone designing government regulation.

Comment author: Lumifer 01 May 2014 04:27:17PM 2 points [-]

What are jobs that have aspects of this?

Management, especially high-level management. This basically what CEOs of large companies are supposed to do.

Politicians (and, by implications, lobbyists, consultants, think tanks, etc.).