The Birth of Marketplace Engineering: Electronic Marketplaces and Dynamic Pricing in the US Airline Industry, 1950s–1980s

This paper explores the archaeology of the platforms that have become ubiquitous in contemporary capitalism. Building on the concept of "marketplace engineering" as it refers to the construction of large infrastructures automating transactions and their accompanying data-driven pricing and matching algorithms, the paper situates the birth of marketplace engineering before the Internet, in the US airline industry. It narrates the logic of development of the first electronic marketplaces, a long process that spanned the 1950s to the 1980s.