Alvin Roth’s discusses market failures and market design . Poorly designed markets unravel and lead to suboptimal outcomes for all the participants.
I stopped reading the book because it was filled with too many overdramatized examples that made it read like bad fiction. This was incredibly frustrating and disappointing, because I think that market failure and better market design will be crucial pieces of the puzzle as we try to solve many of the (probably fatal) problems with the attention economy and consumer capitalism.
I plan to explore some of his lectures on Youtube and academic papers in hopes there’s less cruft and more meat.
His central idea about market design is awesome, however. Here is a summary worth looking into if unfamiliar.