Hidden Market Design ( Extended

The next decade will see an abundance of new intelligent systems, many of which will be market-based. Soon, users will indirectly interact with many markets without knowing it: when driving their car, when listening to a song, when talking on the phone, when backing up their files, or even when surfing the web. I argue that these new systems can only be successful if a new approach is chosen towards designing them. In particular, the complexities of the market must be hidden and the interaction for the user must be seamless. In this paper I introduce the general problem of "Hidden Market Design." An important goal of this research agenda is to understand the trade-off between increasing market efficiency on the one side, and decreasing interaction complexity for the user on the other side. To illustrate the main paradigm, I give a series of examples where hidden markets could be applied. I hope that the problem of hidden market design will inspire other researchers and lead to new research in this direction, paving the way for more successful market-based systems in the future.