Dimitriy Masterov is a marketplace engineer economist. He was most recently the lead economist at Thumbtack, where he built a small team of PhDs to work on marketplace design, platform experimentation, and marketing measurement. Before that, Dimitriy was at eBay Research Labs, where he worked on the intersection of reputation & product design. While Dimitriy has extensive experience working with marketplaces at scale, he also works with earlier stage marketplaces to apply specific techniques marketplaces use to unlock growth across earlier stages.

If you aren’t sure what an engineer economist does, you can think about it like an engineer who doesn’t write software or train machine learning models, but instead uses the tools of economics to help shape how markets operate and actively manage various marketplace network effects. This is becoming increasingly important for marketplaces.

Dimitriy can provide consulting help with the following:

• Helping set take rates & economics on each side of the platform
• Improving reputation, reviews, and other data sources to create trust & safety
• Auctions, sponsored search, & mechanism design (aka reverse game theory)
• Cost-benefit analysis for digital & offline marketing so your CAC doesn’t eclipse your LTV
• Measuring network effects in your marketplace and translating that into pricing, acquisition strategies, balancing and matching demand and supply, & building a moat.
• Agile marketplace experimentation for product decisions (and beyond)
• Metric development for measuring the things you care about (directionality, sensitivity, validation, & short-run surrogates)
• Econometrics and causal ML for when experiments are infeasible, or the data is nonexistent or small
• Pitfalls and opportunities of using ML, surveys, user research, and other complementary techniques
• Hiring good economists, analysts, data scientists, and statisticians that can hit the ground running
• Setting up successful collaborations with academics & other experts

Links: Everything Marketplaces profile, LinkedIn