Inequality: Measurement, Interpretation and Policy network leader Scott Duke Kominers spoke with HCEO recently about the field of market design, and how it can be used to solve real-life problems. "Market design is about building and rebuilding markets," he says. "It's economics as engineering."

"The classical economic ideal of a market sort of a perfectly frictionless place where transactions can happen optimally...is really, really hard to achieve in practice," Kominers says. That being said, in the interview, he shares an amazing example where market design worked exactly as it is intended to: a system of currency that allowed food banks across the country to bid on the foods they wanted, which allowed food to be distributed much more efficiently.

Kominers is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, an Affiliate of the Harvard Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications, an Associate of the Harvard Center for Research on Computation and Society, and a Research Scientist at the Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. Kominers received his AB in Mathematics and PhD in Business Economics from Harvard University, in 2009 and 2011, respectively.