In my research, I seek to understand the challenge of building new markets around and with modern technologies. New technology presents a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is to understand how technology changes our world and the way people and organizations make markets. The opportunity is that the development of new technologies allows us to study the emergence of new governance forms. My research is also motivated by the theoretical tensions between economic sociology, organizational theory, institutional economics and the economics of information. Implicit in market projects are normative goals about what types and how much governance is appropriate and what types of institutions are most effective. Theory makes concerns about governance and institutional innovation explicit. I believe the connection between market construction and emerging technologies provides exciting synergies for future research and teaching.

My dissertation, “The Making of a Modern Market: The Creation of the eBay Marketplace” addresses why and how eBay, an online, person-to-person, marketplace, evolved from a libertarian vision of the perfect market with minimal regulation and oversight into a complex set of governance structures. The Internet has paved the way for the creation of an increasing number of global, impersonal markets where individuals exchange goods and services often in one-time exchanges. Not surprisingly, the same problems that people confront in face to face market transactions also have to be solved online. I use the case of eBay, one of the largest online retail sites in the world, to examine how market actors—the market makers and designers within eBay and buyers and sellers on eBay—solve certain problems in the construction of a market. I use a mixed-method approach: I analyze two unique quantitative data sets and over 50 formal, in-depth and informal interviews to show that eBay's success required market makers and designers to address two fundamental problems: the technical problems of reducing risk and uncertainty in one-time exchanges, and mediating competition by managing a complex, diverse, and growing group of sellers and buyers with often incongruent interests. My dissertation explores the construction of alternative forms of governance of online markets; the formation and organization of trade-unions and seller communities and their influence on market rules; and the struggle over the moral code or ethics of the marketplace rules.