Judd Kessler

Every day you play in countless hidden markets, whether or not you can see them. By better understanding the rules of these markets, and the strategies you need to win in them, you have the potential to dramatically improve what you get. To be a successful market participant, you need to know when to “go for gold” (aiming for what you really want) and when to “settle for silver” (pretending something less desirable is your top choice). You need to know what to signal about yourself—and to whom. You need to know when it makes sense to enter a lottery you want to lose and when you should stay on a waiting list rather than taking what you have been offered. If you want the most desirable outcomes, you can only gain from having a framework for identifying and succeeding in hidden markets.

Your organization also has many hidden markets that leaders design and control—often without realizing it. The rules that you establish for these markets may be far from optimal: they might have been set by historical accident, be poorly designed, and they likely don’t address tech advancements that lead to new opportunities. If your company is tasked with selling a desirable good, setting financial budgets, scheduling work shifts, divvying out perks, addressing consumer complaints, or otherwise allocating a scarce resource—you will benefit immensely from understanding hidden markets and thinking about how they might work better.

There is no one more capable of explaining this—of making this world come alive—than Judd Kessler, a professor at Wharton who has spent the last two decades conducting research on economics in the field of market design, exploring, designing, and improving hidden markets. With Lucky by Design: The Hidden Economics You Need to Get More of What You Want, he has literally written the book on understanding these markets and succeeding in them.

Judd is the inaugural Howard Marks Endowed Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. In 2021, Judd was awarded the prestigious Vernon L. Smith Ascending Scholar Prize for his path breaking scholarship. For his work on organ allocation, he was named one of Forbes’s “30 under 30” in Law and Policy. He is an award-winning teacher whose courses are popular among undergraduates, MBAs, PhD students, and executives, as well as a sought-after speaker. His research and writing have been featured in leading media, such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Scientific American, Harvard Business Review, Politico, NPR, Hidden Brain, and Freakonomics, among others.