Paul Milgrom’s book ‘Discovering Prices’, is a monograph, on a lecture honouring Kenneth Arrow’s works on general equilibrium theory and the associated price-determination processes, which Milgrom delivered at Columbia University on November 17, 2014.

Milgrom opens the 2017 published book with the words ‘the mid1990s was an auspicious time for the new academic discipline that was soon to be known as market design’, and expounds on the matter by setting the 1990s scene.

The period saw the introduction of the Internet Web browser, which provided consumers easy access to the World Wide Web, and to vast volumes of Web-based commerce; online auctions like eBay, online stores and marketplaces like Amazon, and instantaneous advertising auctions like those run by Google.

The period also saw the redesign of the National Resident Matching Programme; which operates the market to match newly graduating doctors to hospital....