Academic center · Science policy · S Woodlawn Ave, Chicago · Est. 2023
The University of Chicago Market Shaping Accelerator (MSA) is an academic initiative focused on “market shaping” mechanisms—policy and incentive designs that make innovation financially viable when purely commercial incentives lag social value—applied to challenges such as pandemics and climate change. MSA’s core role is to translate market-shaping research and prior real-world examples (e.g., advance market commitments used in vaccine development) into proposals that governments, multilateral institutions, and philanthropies can adopt, typically by designing “pull” incentives (prizes, milestone contracts, and advance market commitments) rather than funding only upstream R&D.
The organization is led by a small set of faculty directors from the University of Chicago and Dartmouth College, plus a director role held by Leah Rosenzweig at the Center for Global Development, and it runs an Innovation Challenge to identify, develop, and advance market-shaping proposals. Strategically, MSA positions itself as a connector between academic incentive design, domain expertise (health and climate), and funder/policymaker implementation pathways—aiming to help move from concept to contracts and (eventually) scaled deployment.
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MSA published a blog arguing for disease-agnostic pull funding approaches (rewarding outputs/outcomes) to overcome underinvestment in repurposed generic drug innovation, and discusses potential U.S. agencies/roles for structuring such incentives.
Why Expertise Matters: Building the Coalition to Launch Our Neonatal Sepsis AMCMSA describes a CGD–MSA working group convened to design an advance market commitment (AMC) for a rapid diagnostic test for neonatal sepsis in low- and middle-income countries, including the need for specialized health, economics, and policy expertise and the working group’s core activities.
When Markets Fail Newborns: The Case for an Advance Market Commitment for Neonatal Sepsis DiagnosticsMSA’s blog post (second in a series) makes the case for using an AMC to address under-incentivized diagnostics innovation for neonatal sepsis in low- and middle-income countries and explains the market failures and incentive design logic.
The Case for Prioritizing Neonatal Sepsis DiagnosticsMSA’s blog post (first in a series) argues that neonatal sepsis diagnostics are a global priority and explains why diagnostic innovation can be held back by market failures and misaligned incentives.
Department of Health and Human Services: Don’t Put All Your Vaccine Shots in the Egg BasketMSA published an analysis framing the U.S. Generation Gold Standard effort (universal flu/coronavirus vaccines) as a shift toward longer-lasting protection and argues for incentive/policy approaches that address limitations of strain-specific booster-vaccine paradigms.
Five steps multilateral development banks can take now to unlock pandemic financingMSA and CGD collaborators discussed how multilateral development banks can enable at-risk financing for medical countermeasures for future pandemics, including convening a panel discussion on “Day Zero Dollars.”