Georg Rilinger

About

Georg Rilinger is an Assistant Professor of Technology, Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Strategy at MIT's Sloan School of Management. He studies the orgnaizational and epistemic dynamics behind the construction and regulation of digital markets. At the Weizenbaum Institute he will write an article about the profession of market design, summarizing basic features, goals, and methods, as well as its influence on the structure of digital markets.

More broadly, his work examines market failures such as wide-spread manipulation of electricity markets, suboptimal matching in online labor markets, and speculative bubbles. Unlike economic and sociological research that focuses on aggregate and endogenous dynamics behind such failures, he deploys archival research, qualitative interviews, and ethnographic methods to study the individuals and institutions striving to build, regulate, and control these markets. In particular, he focuses on problems of understanding that emerge because actors’ theories of markets and organizations run up against the social conditions in which they deploy them. For instance, to explain widespread market manipulations in California’s first electricity markets, he studies how market designers tried to realize the logic of theoretical market mechanisms in organizations that built auction platforms for electricity contracts. He earned his PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 2020, spent a postdoctoral period at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, and has been an Assistant Professor at the Sloan School of Management since 2022.

His book, Failure by Design, was published last year by the University of Chicago Press and brings together many of his arguments through the lens of a classic case of market design. A forthcoming article at the American Journal of Sociology, titled "Market Design as Organizational Problem Explaining System Failures in Platform Markets" and a Theory and Society paper titled "Algorithmic Management and the Social Order of Digital Markets" develop the conceptual framework and empirical justification for an organizational sociology of digital markets.

Research Group: Reorganization of Knowledge Practices ( 1.3.2025-1.4.2025)