For millennia the market has been an amazing mechanism for humans to coordinate with each other, without them having to share the same goals. How well the market coordinates, depends not just on the liquidity of the market, but crucially also on the ability to find a suitable match. This requires easy discoverability, comparability, and an effective way to translate such information into a transaction decision. Unfortunately, sharing information with everyone (or at least many) on the market has long been too cumbersome and costly.

Price acted as a suitable ‘workaround’: according to classical economics, all our preferences get condensed into price, greatly reducing the amount of information that needs to be communicated. Price also enables straightforward comparison, easing decision-making. In short, price (and hence money) have long greased the market.

Price, however, is not without weaknesses as an informer on markets. By condensing all available preferences into price, a lot of detail gets lost, leading to erroneous decisions, and thus an inefficient market. Fundamental human biases hinder our ability to translate information gleaned through price into decisions. The result is a market that is far from matching buyers and sellers well. But it's also a market, in which individuals’ detailed preferences often stayed private, because they are only shared in the aggregate.

In contrast to these money-based markets, recently a new breed of markets has arisen. These are markets teeming with information about preferences and product (or service) qualities, as well as buyer (or seller) behaviour. These data-rich markets, when combined with the appropriate technical tools (data ontologies, matching algorithms, and especially data-driven machine learning systems for decision assistance), offer matches that are vastly superior compared with conventional markets.

Often today, we read about how consumers lose control over their data online, and thus their preferences become transparent to sellers. But often overlooked has been the opposite dynamic: how online markets have made sellers and their products and services more transparent to consumers, leading to better matches through consumer empowerment. Better matches mean more value for the money consumers spend, creating significant additional consumer welfare, and an improved, more efficient, and more sustainable economy.