Michael Ostrovsky is an industrial organization economist who specializes in marketplace design, auctions, and game theory, with applications in the technology and financial services industries. Professor Ostrovsky has analyzed the optimal design of internet advertising auctions, information propagation in financial markets, the properties of choice screen mechanisms as an antitrust remedy, stability and equilibrium in two-sided markets, voting in shareholder meetings, and the interplay between self-driving cars and other modes of transportation.
Professor Ostrovsky has substantial consulting experience. He has advised on marketplace design and bidding in high-stakes auctions for Airbnb, Comcast, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Sprint, and Yahoo, among other organizations. He also spent a year at Google as a visiting scientist. Professor Ostrovsky has been retained as an expert witness and has submitted expert reports on various issues.
In his research, Professor Ostrovsky examines the theoretical and applied aspects of market design, with an emphasis on online auctions, matching mechanisms, information economics, and transportation markets. These issues are fundamental to understanding the microstructure of economic markets, including how equilibrium prices form, how economic institutions shape strategic interactions among their participants, and how to optimally design these institutions to support efficient competition.
Professor Ostrovsky’s articles have appeared in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, Econometrica, the RAND Journal of Economics, and the Journal of Financial Economics, among other peer-reviewed publications. His coauthored American Economic Review article, on internet advertising and the generalized second-price auction (GSP), won the Game Theory Society’s Kalai Prize for the best paper at the interface of game theory and computer science. The Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) honored the paper with its SIGecom Test of Time award.
Professor Ostrovsky is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), where he is also a codirector of the Working Group on Market Design. He has served as coeditor of the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics and associate editor of Econometrica.
At Stanford’s Graduate School of Business (GSB), Professor Ostrovsky has taught courses on managerial economics as well as pricing and market design. He is also affiliated with the GSB’s Corporate Governance Research Center.