Welcome to my professional website!
My academic journey began at the University of Minnesota, where I had the privilege of completing my Ph.D. in 1984 under the mentorship of Nobel Laureate Leonid Hurwicz. After that, I was a research fellow at the Institute of Economic Analysis of Barcelona and at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, becoming a full professor ("catedrático") at the University of Alicante in 1990. In 2007 I joined the European University Institute in Florence and in 2013 Bocconi University in Milan. From the Fall of 2025 I am a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
My work has largely focused on the theory of games and its socio-economic applications, with a special emphasis on how strategic behavior is shaped by the interplay of social networks, learning, and evolution. Such an interplay is crucial to understanding many important phenomena in complex social environments. Prominent examples are: the propagation of real or financial disturbances along supply chains; the way in which social unrest may gather momentum in large populations; how knowledge is shared (or not) among entrepreneurs cooperating or/and competing to varying degrees; whether the contagion of a virus – or, for that matter, the spread of fake news – eventually reaches a substantial fractional size. These are the types of questions that drive much of my current research, the aim being to integrate theoretical and (structural) empirical analyses. For, in my view, the fast-growing availability of large scale data in so many socio-economic domains not only opens an unprecedented opportunity for such integration – it also renders it essential.
For a detailed account of my professional activities, you can check my Curriculum Vitae
