Bio

I was born in Barcelona (1956) and received my undergraduate degree in Economics at the Universitat de Barcelona in 1980. I received my Ph.D. in Economics in 1988 from the State University of New York at Stony Brook under the supervision of Bob Rosenthal. In 1988-1989 I was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pittsburgh with Al Roth. Since 1989 I have been teaching and doing research in Economics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where in 1994 I was promoted to full professor. From 1996 to 2000 I was chairman of its Department of Economics and in the periods 1990-1994 and 2002-2004 I was coordinator of the IDEA doctoral program. I was Co-editor of Investigaciones Económicas (1996-99) and Associate Editor of Economics Bulletin (2001-2012), Economic Research International (2010-2017) and Review of Economic Design (2015-2019). Currently I am Associate Editor of Social Choice and Welfare (since 2005), Journal of Dynamics and Games (since 2015), and Mathematical Social Sciences (since 2018). I was an elected member of the Executive Committee of the Spanish Economic Association (1999-2001) and since 2009 I am one of its Honorary Fellows. From 2006 to 2011 I was an elected member of the Council of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare and I was elected again for the period 2014-2019. Since 2006 I am an Affiliated Professor at the Barcelona School of Economics. I have received the prize "ICREA Acadèmia" (2009-2013) for excellence in research, funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya. In 2021 I have been elected fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET) and in 2022 I have been distinguished by the Instituto de Matemática Aplicada San Luis (Argentina) with the recognition of Honorary Researcher. I was the Dean of the School of Economics and Business at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (2012-2015) and since the end of 2022 I am the director of CODE (a research center at the UAB). I have visited Stanford University, Université de Montréal, Osaka University (ISER), Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Università degli Studi di Padova, Singapore Management University, Universidade de Vigo, and Universidad Nacional de San Luis (IMASL, Argentina). I have advised ten Ph.D. students.

I work on Mechanism Design, a research area in the intersection of Game Theory and Social Choice Theory that deals with the study and design of institutions (mechanisms) with the aim of helping societies to take collective decisions. The emphasis is not only on the normative properties of the mechanism (for instance efficiency and equity) but also on the strategic incentives they induce on agents. Recently, I have been applying mechanism design tools to study three different classes of problems: matching, voting, and the allocation of a divisible good.