About

Georg Rilinger is the Fred Kayne (1960) Career Development Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship and an Assistant Professor of Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research focuses on topics in economic sociology, particularly on issues related to social engineering in the digital economy, the role of expertise in government, the creation of markets, and regulatory failure. His recent work has concentrated on practical obstacles to market design, the theory of secrecy, the role of economic experts in governmental processes, and the theory of regulatory capture. Georg holds a BA in political science from the Freie Universität in Berlin, an MPhil in politics from the University of Oxford (Exeter College), and an MA and PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago. Before joining Sloan, he completed a Postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Economics
• Sociology
• Business
• Engineering
• Finance
• Mathematics
• Positive economics
• Epistemology
• Electrical engineering
• Market economy
• Mechanical engineering
• Marketing
• Microeconomics
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Mary J. Waller and Seth A. Kaplan. Crisis-Ready Teams: Data-Driven Lessons from Aviation, Nuclear Power, Emergency Medicine, and Mine Rescue WallerMary J.KaplanSeth A.Crisis-Ready Teams: Data-Driven Lessons from Aviation, Nuclear Power, Emergency Medicine, and Mine Rescue. Stanford Business Books, 2024. 200 pp. $28, hardcover.

  Administrative Science Quarterly · 2025-09-17

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• Market Design as Organizational Problem: Explaining System Failures in Platform Markets

  American Journal of Sociology · 2025-02-20 · 4 citations

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  System failures occur when organizations managing sociotechnical systems lose control over interactions between components. To prevent such failures, organizations decompose systems into simpler parts and empower frontline experts to manage them in a flat hierarchy. The article examines whether such “modularization” applies to the design of platform markets, focusing on California’s electricity markets between 1995 and 2000. Although modularization seemed like a reasonable technique to avoid system failures, the platforms became vulnerable to persistent gaming. Drawing on rich archival data and interviews, the article finds that the platform markets violated a central requirement for distributed organizations. Market actors, unlike organizational employees, did not cooperate to maintain the relationship between modules. This hindered designers’ ability to prevent, detect, and correct failures. The case reveals a tension between designers’ efforts to coordinate actors via incentives and organizational strategies to manage complex sociotechnical systems, highlighting the need for an organizational sociology of digital marketplaces.

  PublisherDOI

• Algorithmic Management and the Social Order of Digital Markets

  Theory and Society · 2024-05-13 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Platform companies use techniques of algorithmic management to control their users. Though digital marketplaces vary in their use of these techniques, few studies have asked why. This question is theoretically consequential. Economic sociology has traditionally focused on the embedded activities of market actors to explain competitive and valuation dynamics in markets. But restrictive platforms can leave little autonomy to market actors. Whether or not the analytical focus on their interactions makes sense thus depends on how restrictive the platform is, turning the question into a first order analytical concern. The paper argues that we can explain why platforms adopt more and less restrictive architectures by focusing on the design logic that informs their construction. Platforms treat markets as search algorithms that blend software computation with human interactions. If the algorithm requires actors to follow narrow scripts of behavior, the platform should become more restrictive. This depends on the need for centralized computation, the degree to which required inputs can be standardized, and the misalignment of interests between users. The paper discusses how these criteria can be mobilized to explain the architectures of four illustrative cases.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Organizational Limits of Market Design

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2023-07-24 · 2 citations

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  Despite much research on market design, we know little about the conditions under which market design projects fail. Starting with the insight that digital markets are built and maintained inside organizations, the paper finds that modularization can derail market design work for complex problems. The argument emerges from the analysis of an extreme case: the creation and collapse of California’s electricity markets between 1993 and 2001. Despite careful planning by the world’s foremost experts, the auction systems produced a variety of incentives for manipulative behavior. Drawing on data from four archives and semi-structured interviews, the paper explores why designers may inadvertently adopt problematic design features. It argues that designers often seek to devise market architectures of inter-connected modules that break complex problems into more manageable chunks. This helps to avoid ‘Normal Accidents,’ which arise if systems become too complex to control. But to work as intended, all modules must be connected to each other in the right way and in de-signer markets , this requires that actors face globally consistent rules and procedures. However, modularized design work tends to produce only locally consistent rules, obscures global inconsistencies, and resists iterative problem-solving. This can produce gaming incentives and reintroduce the complex interdependencies designers tried to avoid .

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• The Current Economy: Electricity Markets and Techno-Economics

  Contemporary Sociology A Journal of Reviews · 2022 · 11 citations

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  • Economics
  • Business
  • Market economy
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• Conceptual limits of performativity: assessing the feasibility of market design blueprints

  Socio-Economic Review · 2022 · 28 citations

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  • Computer Science
  • Sociology
  • Computer Science

  Abstract Market designers work as social engineers. They create institutional structures to enforce the assumptions of theoretical market mechanisms. Despite much work on performative effects of economics, sociology has not analyzed the feasibility of designers’ theoretical blueprints. This article suggests that this may be done by identifying assumptions that derail the mechanism if they are not enforced. Sociologists then need to trace obstacles to their realization in practices of implementation. Blueprints are infeasible if the assumptions cannot be enforced either by themselves or jointly. To illustrate the approach, the article identifies one such assumption and traces its impact on a historical experiment of market design: the creation of markets for transmission capacity in California’s electricity markets. To realize the design’s explicit assumptions, designers built institutions that violated an implicit uniformity assumption and created opportunities for manipulations. Since the design’s assumptions could not be realized simultaneously, it was infeasible.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Discursive multivocality: how the proliferation of economic language can undermine the political influence of economists

  Socio-Economic Review · 2022-01-26 · 10 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article shows how the proliferation of economic language can undermine the political authority of economists. The argument emerges from a comparative case study of two early experiments with electricity market design. Relying on archival materials and 30 in-depth interviews, I examine why political actors ignored the advice of economists in California, while they deferred to the experts in the Pennsylvania, Jersey, Maryland (PJM) region. The debates were framed in economic language, but stakeholders interpreted central concepts differently without recognizing the resulting ambiguities. This ‘discursive multivocality’ undermined economists’ authority as experts. It challenged economists’ monopoly on the interpretation of economic concepts and undercut rhetorical strategies to reassert the superiority of their understanding. At the PJM Interconnect, the experts overcame this problem by switching to a different conceptual apparatus. Ironically, economists could establish their authoritative understanding of economics by appealing to a shared understanding of engineering problems.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Texas Blackouts and the Problems of Electricity Market Design

  2021-03-24 · 1 citations

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• Who captures whom? Regulatory misperceptions and the timing of cognitive capture

  Regulation & Governance · 2021 · 44 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Economics
  • Positive economics

  Abstract To explain cognitive capture, economic sociologists often examine the structure of relationships between regulators and market participants. This paper argues that the nature of regulators' misperception should be subject to analysis as well. Different types of misperceptions develop over timelines of varying lengths. Depending on the misperception, different sets of relationships and parties may therefore be the cause of regulators' capture. The paper illustrates this point with a case study of regulators' failure to detect pervasive market power in California's electricity markets between 1998 and 2001. Existing explanations focus on sellers' short‐term attempts to distract regulators from widespread evidence of market power. Using data from three archives and in‐depth interviews, I show that the regulators did not fall prey to such “information problems.” Instead, their misperception resulted from a more foundational “worldview problem.” This error affects regulators' basic conception of the marketplace and can be traced to earlier and more gradual forms of influence exerted by utilities that, ironically, would become the victims of market power.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Toward a Sociology of Economic Engineering: The Creation and Collapse of California’s Electricity Markets between 1993 and 2001

  Knowledge@UChicago (University of Chicago) · 2020-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This dissertation examines the creation and catastrophic failure of California’s electricity markets in the period between 1993 and 2001. It looks at this case as an extreme example of failed market design. No longer content to merely describe the world, market designers try to create institutional frameworks that can enforce the idealizing assumptions of economic theory. The dissertation asks why the California markets were built in such a way that they became vulnerable to widespread corporate crime. The first part reconstructs the structural preconditions for the Western energy crisis. It finds that the markets suffered from a self-destructive dynamic that would have pushed the system to the brink of collapse even absent the proximate causes usually stressed by the literature. To understand what prompted the design decisions that triggered this dynamic, I look at three different domains of design work: politics, regulation, and technical implementation. I show that each domain posed unique problems to the realization of the market designers’ vision. In political processes, designers struggled to obtain jurisdiction over decisions that violated the principles of market design. In technical contexts, their decisions suffered from “blindspots” that were embedded in the theoretical blueprints they used in their work. Finally, in regulatory contexts, market designers underestimated the oversight requirements of their market mechanisms. Their silence led regulators to create the monitoring protocols on the basis of a flawed imaging of the new markets. Apart from developing a new explanation of the California energy crisis, the dissertation develops a theoretical perspective on market design work as a form of centralized planning. It argues that the practical design problems go back to an unspoken tension between a mechanistic and an emergentist understanding of markets that is implicit in the intellectual project of market design. This tension calls for contradictory design decisions. Since only a control structure can potentially resolve these contradictions, success and failure of market design ultimately hinges on the requirements for effective market oversight. If the allocation problem requires adaptive, interdependent markets with narrow standards of calculative rationality, these requirements become so extensive that they bring classic problems of centralized planning back into the project. The study is based on extensive archival material from three different archives and seventy-five in-depth interviews.

  PublisherDOI

Education

• PhD , Sociology

  University of Chicago

  2020

• MPhil in Politics: Political Theory , Department of Politics and International Relations

  University of Oxford

  2013

• B.A. Politikwissenschaft, Politikwissenschaft

  Freie Universitat Berlin

  2011

Awards & honors

• Failure by Design. Rilinger, Georg (2025 Winner of the Secti…