When AI agents mediate every interaction, market design becomes a question of economic power. This webinar will explore how different agentic market architectures could reshape competition, transparency, and consumer welfare.
The webinar “Agentic Markets” considers a future where consumers and firms interact via personalized AI agents. The architecture of these agentic markets will determine who wins and who loses. In a walled garden, where agents are owned and hosted by a centralized platform, market power concentrates as the platform monetizes access to consumer attention, extracting rents from the opacity it creates.
In an open web of agents with a high degree of transparency, markets are democratized and competition shifts from an attention economy to a preference economy in which firm agents buy access to consumer agents who are endowed with their users’ preferences.
Underlying these scenarios, the communication abilities of agents can significantly reduce search friction, but perhaps surprisingly, more informative search can degrade consumer welfare by obfuscating market-level information unless market infrastructure is designed to share what agents learn and by weakening inter-firm competition.
Nicole Immorlica is a professor at Yale University and a researcher at Microsoft.
Her research uses tools from economics and computer science to study the design and impact of sociotechnical systems. Lately, she has focused on understanding the economic impacts of generative AI.
She is the recipient of a number of fellowships and awards including ACM Fellow, Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET) Fellow, the Sloan Fellowship, the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship and the NSF CAREER Award. She has served on several boards including the ACM SIGecom executive board, the editorial board of Games and Economic Behavior, and the INFORMS Auction and Market Design board.
“Agentic Markets” is part of the VOILA! Seminars organised by EFELIA Côte d’Azur – French School of Artificial Intelligence. These seminars aim to explore the frontiers of AI in an inclusive and open manner, welcoming everyone. The goal is to provide insights and answers to major societal and academic questions on topics such as AI & Environment, AI & Work, AI & Education, AI & Media, AI & Law, AI & Creativity, AI & Health, and much more.
