Currently, there monopolization of market design economics around private sector digital marketplaces. These market places are at the center of business models of the largest and most powerful companies in the United States today -- Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook. There is “meta” to this story where meta is an adjective or prefix meaning more comprehensive or transcending.

This monopolization of market design economics has caused its leading market designer Google to ignore market design principles when it bargained with Apple to be its default search engine on Apple devices. This blindness caused Google to lose a monopolization lawsuit. 

Google should have structured  the negotiations and contracts to reflect a combinatorial position auction with a bid menu of exclusive vs shared positions with alleged substantial subadditive value.  It should have included an explicit liquidated damage clause, stipulating that the contract would be renegotiated yearly if a new bid justified “an efficient breach” switch to the shared position.  

Via yearly solicitation of bids for shared positions from Microsoft and others, Google could obtained market based estimates of alleged subadditive value of a shared position. It could have even allowed a two year experiment of search engine shared position assignments.  Had Google done this, it may have prevailed in a recent Department of Justice antitrust monopolization lawsuit, whose impending remedy could kill this $23 Billion company.