In this interview segment, Ramesh Johari explains the pivotal moment that shifted his research focus from pure applied mathematics to online marketplaces. After years of theoretical work at Stanford, a sabbatical in 2011 led him to join oDesk (now Upwork) as a research scientist, eventually heading the Data Products and Research team. He was drawn to marketplaces because they provide a closed, data‑rich environment where every transaction can be observed, allowing researchers to test economic theories against real‑world behavior. Johari reflects on how this experience reshaped his academic trajectory over the past twelve years and now advises graduate students to start their research where he began—in data‑driven marketplace studies—rather than following his earlier, theory‑only path.
Chapters
What initially kind of led you to marketplaces and why have you continued to focus on them, you know, throughout your advising and academic career?
Yeah, this is actually a good story and I think it's related to, you know, often my grad students sort of ask me like, oh, you know, what should I do as a PhD student? What should I do as like a new, you know, assistant faculty member somewhere? And the main thing I tell them is don't do what I did. And the reason is when I got here, like I said, I started in 2004. When I got to Stanford, I, like I said, I was doing applied math basically. I didn't touch data for the first, you know, 8 or 9 years I was here. I just built models of things and talked about what those models had to say about the world. And it was kind of a funny thing, but, you know, basically, like, as I got tenure and then I came up for a sabbatical, took some time, wanted to figure out, you know, what should I do? A couple of my friends were sort of telling me, you know, hey, like, you spent all this time working on theory and math. What makes you think any of that is actually you know, meaningful or accurate, you know, maybe you should go talk to people who actually work with real data and, you know, sort of stress test like, hey, like, is theorizing about the world actually a useful thing to do? So that's what I did in 2011. I took a leave to go to what was then oDesk, it's now Upwork. And first I started out as a research scientist there and then I ended up running the data science team. It was called Data Products and Research. And You know, really the reason I went to ODesk is because I wanted to understand if you ran a whole market, you got to see everything. You got to see matches all the way over to how matches completed. So it's basically like you were sort of almost, you know, like kind of omnisciently observing, like in The Truman Show, you know, what's going on in this entire marketplace. Then do you need theory anymore? Like, do you need models? Do you need like a, you know, sort of a framework within which you reason about the market. And we'll talk more about this, but basically that's certainly what led me into marketplaces is essentially that they were, from an economic standpoint, one of the most exciting ways that technology was changing human interaction, I thought, because of this kind of closed nature of the system where you could observe so much. And then as someone who, you know, put so much effort into modeling and thinking about the structure of these kinds of systems, I really wanted to understand what the data that these markets were generating had to tell us about economic activity. So that was back in 2012, and it's 2024 now, and the last 12 years of my life have been shaped by that left turn. So now I tell my students, start where I started in 2012, not where I started in 2004.
