Mechanism design matters

in economics, there’s a field called mechanism design. Think about it like this: eBay decided a long time ago to connect buyers and sellers of used stuff. They realized they needed lots of buyers AND lots of sellers to make a platform work.

So, they set out to design a mechanism, a so-called second price auction, that maximizes just that, the benefits to both the buyer and the seller.

The thing is, the decision was easy; the implementation took them years to get right. Mechanism design is the science of creating processes and environments to implement decisions.

Decision theory is, well, peanuts compared to implementation.