The Inner Lives of Markets

Let's say you were stuck in a gruesome POW Camp and you wanted a decent meal (or a pack of cigarettes or a quality cup of coffee or some fresh fruit), what on earth would you do? Or if you wanted a gun (but couldn't pass a background check), where would you get it? Or if you were desperate for a kidney, and looking for a faster way to procure one, how might you swing that? All of the solutions lie in that elusive, vague, far reaching, overused and knotty term, "the market". We all think we understand what "the market" means, but would probably be flummoxed if we were asked to explain it or define it. Economists, though, have actually spent a great deal of time thinking through the many subtle nuances of every possible marketplace - managing illicit goods, figuring out how prices are set, coping with situations in which markets are hard to "clear" (online dating and toxic waste are classic examples), and what to do when manipulation or misinformation warps a marketplace (like, say, when those Airbnb photos look a lot nicer than the actual house).

In The Inner Lives of Markets, Ray Fisman (the Lambert Family Professor at Columbia Business School) and Tim Sullivan (the editorial director of Harvard Business School Press) invite you into these mysterious corners of our everyday economics. Who buys, who sells, why it matters, when it works, and what to do when it breaks.