c:o/re Junior Fellow 09/23 − 04/25
Guillaume’s research interests are in economic sociology and the sociology of science and technology, with a focus on how electronic commerce transforms markets. His research brings an attention to technological changes, the conflicts they can cause, and the systems’ designers practices, to examine changes in market microstructures. He is currently developing a historical inquiry into airlines electronic commerce infrastructures and dynamic pricing mechanisms since the deregulation of the industry in the 1980s. He has taught a variety of courses in sociology, economic history and history of economics. Prior to joining the RWTH in Aachen, Guillaume held research and teaching positions at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, the London School of Economics, and the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University. He studied sociology and economics at the École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay, and earned his PhD in sociology from the École des mines in Paris. His dissertation examines electricity pricing in France, 1940s-1970s, as this is where some of the core techniques underlying today’s advanced pricing mechanisms were formed.
The Rise of Marketplace Engineering: How Do Airlines Sell Seats?
Many markets nowadays feature complex electronic commerce infrastructures and advanced dynamic pricing mechanisms. Instead of paving the way to frictionless, transparent markets populated by many small companies, online commerce has raised regulatory concerns over concentration, while dynamic pricing has triggered consumers’ backlash over perceived price gouging and unfair personalization. Marketplace engineering is both broader and more specific than “platforms,” and has a longer history. US airlines pioneered marketplace engineering after the deregulation of the industry in the late 1970s. It spread in the 1990s to freight, railroads, hotels, car rentals, cruises and casinos. Since the 2000s, in the online and then mobile computing environment, marketplace engineering has been at the heart of the rise of online retailers, ride-hailing applications, ad exchanges and entertainment events tickets sellers. What does the rise of marketplace engineering do to markets? How has this computerized, techno-scientific development transformed the ways firms make money as well as market microstructures? This research project asks an apparently simple question: how do airlines sell seats? Answering this question requires a historical enquiry into the making of airlines’ electronic commerce infrastructures since the 1950s, the late 1970s deregulation of the industry, the emergence of sophisticated dynamic pricing mechanisms in the 1980s (the revenue management systems), and since then the interplay between competition, technology, and regulation. This project integrates the sociology of science and technology concern for the material politics of large technological systems with the historical epistemology of the practices and the concepts guiding the work of the systems’ engineers – operations researchers, data scientists, computer scientists, econometricians.
Publications (selection)
Yon, Guillaume. 2023. Revenue Management. In History of O.R. Excellence, The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. https://www.informs.org/Explore/History-of-O.R.-Excellence/O.R.-Methodologies/Revenue-Management
Yon, Guillaume. 2020. Building a National Machine: The Pricing of Electricity in Postwar France. In History of Political Economy 52, annual suppl. (2020): 246-69.
