Guillaume Yon

Sociology

yon@time.rwth-aachen.de

Guillaume Yon is a sociologist of science and technology. He is currently an assistant professor at the RWTH, the university of Aachen in Germany, where he works in the business school within the Technology and Innovation Management group. 

His research examines the technologies that shape today’s markets, with a focus on pricing mechanisms. His current research investigates the history of airlines’ revenue management algorithms, which play a key role in setting the price of airlines’ seats. He recently joined the SAFEr grid project, a team of computer scientists, power system engineers, power electronics engineers and economists developing a new grid architecture - new transformers, controls, communication protocols and economic arrangements - to enable the mass integration of decentralized renewable energy resources. An earlier project of his studied the development of marginal cost pricing in the French postwar electricity system. 

Selected Publications

(2025) The Birth of Marketplace Engineering: Electronic Commerce Infrastructures and Dynamic Pricing Mechanisms in the US Airline Industry, 1950s-1990s Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics 6(1): 82-128.

(2023) Revenue Management The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) History of O.R.

https://www.informs.org/Explore/History-of-O.R.-Excellence/O.R.-Methodo…

(2020) Building a National Machine: The Pricing of Electricity in Postwar France History of Political Economy 52(annual supplement): 246-69.