Spring 2026 IDE Lunch Seminar (In-Person Ticket): Hanna Halaburda

MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy

MIT Sloan School of Management

Hanna Halaburda: "When Contestability Leads to Concentration in Digital Markets"Biography: Hanna Halaburda studies how new digital technologies reshape economic power. Her research examines whether changes in technological infrastructure lead markets to concentrate or decentralize—and which design choices determine those outcomes.Her work spans platforms, blockchain systems, and emerging AI ecosystems. Using tools from industrial organization, game theory, and market design, she analyzes tipping, concentration, coordination failure, re-centralization, and adoption dynamics in digital markets. Rather than advocating for or against particular technologies, her focus is on economic structure: identifying the incentive mechanisms that shape how digital systems evolve, how tradeoffs emerge, and who ultimately controls them.Professor Halaburda is an Associate Professor at NYU Stern School of Business and Co-Director of the NYU Blockchain Lab. Her research has been published in journals including Management Science, RAND Journal of Economics, American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, and Journal of Economic Literature. She is co-author of Beyond Bitcoin: The Economics of Digital Currencies and Blockchain Technologies (2nd ed., 2022).Abstract: Digital markets often appear highly competitive in their early phases: firms race to acquire compute, data, users, or routing flow, and consumers can switch freely across providers. Yet many of these markets rapidly concentrate. What drives this pattern? We develop a model to isolate a minimal structural mechanism for concentration that does not rely on traditional network effects, switching costs, or behavioral lock-in. Instead, centralization emerges from contestability over rival inputs combined with quality-based competition. The framework applies to digital markets such as search advertising, spectrum-based services, high-frequency trading, and emerging AI ecosystems in which access to compute, data, or routing flow determines performance. We show that markets may stay competitive (but are not guaranteed) only when rival input constraints are relaxed or multihoming is frictionless.(<a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6299698" title="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6299698" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6299698</a>)

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