In this episode, we’re talking about congestion pricing — an area of mechanism design that’s aimed at alleviating something everyone hates: traffic. In the first part of today’s episode, we’ll trace the history of the economic ideas that got us here. In the middle, we’ll dig deeper into the details of putting congestion pricing into practice, plus technological alternatives. And in the final part, we’ll explore parallels to — and implications for — crypto networks. Our guest is Michael Ostrovsky (@mostrovs), a Stanford Economics Professor who specializes in this area and who has done research on congestion pricing in New York. We’re also joined by a16z crypto Research Partner Scott Kominers (@skominers), who is a Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where he teaches market design and entrepreneurship. With our host @rhhackett. Timestamps: 00:00 - introduction 01:51 - NYC proposal history 03:38 - economic theory of congestion pricing 09:15 - implementation: challenges and solutions 26:00 - technological alternatives and drones 29:49 - overnight delivery and other possibilities 35:20 - carpooling and how to encourage it 39:34 - congestion pricing and crypto 47:59 - lessons for blockchains