Lucky by Design: How to Navigate Hidden Markets

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Program Experience

Highlights and Key Outcomes

This course gives you frameworks to understand how scarce opportunities are allocated, insights to participate more strategically, and tools to improve the systems you influence or control.

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

Identify hidden markets by recognizing scarce resources, excess demand, and the non-price rules that determine access
Classify allocation rules, including first-come, first-served races, lines, and waiting lists; lotteries; two-sided markets; and centralized clearinghouses
Evaluate how well a hidden market performs using the criteria of equity, efficiency, and ease
Identify optimal participant strategies for the rules at play, such as preparing for a race, sending a credible signal, or reporting preferences truthfully
Recommend practical improvements that advance equity, efficiency, and ease while supporting the market designer’s goals
Anticipate how participants may respond to incentives, rule changes, and proposed redesigns
Create a Hidden Market Action Plan or Hidden Market Design Toolkit you can use after the course

Experience and Impact

Self-paced and delivered entirely online, Lucky by Design: How to Navigate Hidden Markets is organized into two modules and a required culminating project. Short video lectures are paired with guiding questions, workbook-based analysis, required applied activities, challenges, and retrieval practice quizzes. The result is a guided diagnostic and redesign practicum, built for independent learning rather than passive viewing.

Module 1: Spotting the Rules of Hidden Markets
Learn to see the hidden markets operating in professional and everyday life. You will identify the scarce resource, the people seeking access, and the rule that determines who gets what when price is not doing the deciding.
Module 2: Using and Improving the Rules of Hidden Markets
Build judgment as both a participant and a designer. You will identify optimal strategies given the rule in use; evaluate outcomes using the criteria of equity, efficiency, and ease; predict how savvy participants may respond; and recommend practical changes that advance the market designer’s goals.
Your Hidden Market Playbook
Complete the course by synthesizing your work into one practical artifact. Choose a Hidden Market Action Plan focused on a real system you participate in, influence, or control, or create a Hidden Market Design Toolkit that can be used repeatedly to diagnose and improve hidden markets in new contexts. Both options help you identify a hidden market, define what is not working, and recommend changes that improve fairness, efficiency, or ease.

Wharton Online Authors Series

Lucky by Design: How to Navigate Hidden Markets is part of the Wharton Online Authors Series, which brings the ideas of Wharton faculty books into focused, applied online learning experiences. Drawing on Kessler's book, Lucky by Design: The Hidden Economics You Need to Get More of What You Want, this course turns market-design research into a practical process you can use at work and beyond.

Each course in the Wharton Online Authors Series includes a complimentary e-book by the featured faculty author.

What Do I Earn?

CEU Credits

To receive CEUs for your Wharton Online program(s), you must complete all coursework and pass all assessments in a CEU-eligible program of study with a score of 70 percent or above.

CEUs are included with every Wharton Online program. Upon successful program completion, learners automatically earn one CEU, which is noted in the digital credentials.

Credentialing

When you complete all required activities, you will receive a digital credential recognizing your achievement, a verified and shareable signal you can post on LinkedIn, your website, your resume, or your email signature. Skills associated with the credential include:

Systems Analysis
Critical Thinking
Judgment and Decision Making
Stakeholder and Incentive Analysis
Process Improvement

Who Should Attend

This course is designed for self-directed professionals who want to understand why scarce opportunities can feel random, burdensome, or unfair, and who want a practical framework for navigating or improving the systems around them. Ideal participants include:

Professionals seeking better strategies for accessing scarce assignments, roles, schedules, resources, or leadership attention
Managers and functional leaders who allocate limited time, budgets, projects, support, or access to decision makers
Rising leaders who want to improve how teams prioritize requests, assign work, manage bottlenecks, or distribute opportunities
Employees, managers, and entrepreneurs who participate in races, matching processes, two-sided markets, or other systems where price does not determine access
Readers of Lucky by Design who want to apply its ideas through structured practice and a usable final project

Group Enrollment

To further leverage the value and impact of this program, we encourage companies to send cross-functional teams of executives to Wharton. We offer group-enrollment benefits to companies sending four or more participants.

Faculty

Judd Kessler, PhDSee Faculty Bio

Academic Director

Howard Marks Endowed Professor; Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy, The Wharton School

Research Interests: Experimental economics, public economics, behavioral economics, market design