This dissertation establishes a sociotechnical systems engineering approach to the study of markets and is composed of four parts. First, I differentiate the sociotechnical perspective of markets from other disciplinary approaches. Second, I develop an ontology-based diagrammatic method to represent a market-system’s sociotechnical architecture. Third, I develop an empirical method to evaluate the functionality of a market-system’s sociotechnical architecture. Fourth, I apply these sociotechnical methods to address a social problem inherent to all markets, market access inequality. By modeling markets as sociotechnical systems, this dissertation contributes a novel perspective to market research and offers an avenue to systems engineering for studying highly-social sociotechnical system applications. Future research can leverage the descriptive and evaluative methods developed in this dissertation to analyze market-systems and detect opportunities for intervention and design.