Economics in some discussions is sometimes dismissed as rather “useless”. Often, this is based on issues such as a poor performance of an inflation forecasts, (too) abstract models, or other „big-ticket“ items.
Such views might ignore a lot of more “granular” economics work and results in, for example:
- Matching Markets. Designing functioning markets, exchange, or matching can be tough. There have been advances in areas such as in how to design matching markets. These aren’t just some intellectual exercises but can help to inform how, for example, some organ donor settings work.
- Auctions. There has been progress in creating auctions to solve complex allocation problems. Of course, auctions are in a lot of places these days, for example, in placing online ads, but (complex) auctions were also put to use in reallocating and freeing up electromagnetic spectrum.
- Productivity. There is work on how variations in productivity relate to market share, revenue, and profits. How productivity differences can shape competitive landscapes (macro and micro) could also help to untangle causal relationships (e.g., market share from economics of scale or economics of scale from market share from productivity).
- Organizations. Why and how firms form has been studied by economics. Understanding, for example, possible reasons for vertical integration (e.g., conflicts of interest) or for firm formation (e.g., transactions costs for purely market-based interactions) could help guide the future shape of organizations or help understand the impact of new technologies on firms.
When considering decisions on socio-economic or business issues it might be worth to push a little deeper into what economics could offer there rather than (just) look towards it for high-level forecasting or models.