Masterclass: Designing Markets in the Age of AI: Visibility, Coordination, and Power
This masterclass draws from the short book “The Great Sleepwalk”. It is a condensed version of Irene’s full course on Markets and Service Ecosystems which she conducts together with the team at the HATLAB Studio for the SEE-ME Program.
Masterclass Description (3 hours)
This masterclass explores how markets are changing at a structural level — and why many of today’s economic failures cannot be explained by prices, firms, or platforms alone.
Drawing on The Great Sleepwalk, this session examines markets as designed coordination systems rather than natural arenas of exchange. It traces the evolution of market coordination from ancient trade networks and industrial firms to digital platforms and AI-mediated infrastructures, showing how each phase reshaped visibility, agency, and power.
Participants will explore why modern economies increasingly suffer from pre-transaction failures: duplicated verification, fragmented eligibility, platform dependency, and the hollowing-out of individuals, micro-firms, and even states. These failures, the masterclass argues, arise not from market inefficiency but from misaligned coordination architectures.
The session combines conceptual frameworks, historical examples, and contemporary case studies to address three core questions:
How do markets actually coordinate behaviour in digital environments?
Why do platforms see everything while individuals see almost nothing?
What new market forms become possible when people can hold, reuse, and deploy their own data?
The masterclass concludes by introducing emerging design principles for post-platform markets — including self-custody data assets, AI-mediated exchange, and the rise of micro-firms — and invites participants to rethink what market governance means in an era where software increasingly is the market.
This session is suitable for advanced undergraduate, postgraduate, doctoral, and executive audiences across economics, management, public policy, data governance, and technology studies.
Learning Outcomes
Participants will be able to:
Analyse markets as coordination systems rather than price mechanisms alone
Identify structural coordination failures in digital and regulated markets
Understand how data and AI reshape market visibility and power
Evaluate alternative market designs beyond platforms and firms
Apply market design thinking to policy, regulation, and institutional reform
Format & Pedagogy
Interactive lecture with live conceptual mapping
Short provocations and discussion segments
Optional applied case or design exercise
Suitable as a standalone masterclass or embedded module session
About the Instructor
Irene Ng is a professor, entrepreneur, and systems designer whose work sits at the intersection of economics, technology, and market design. She is the founder of Dataswyft and has advised governments, regulators, and organisations globally on data governance and digital market architecture.