I was born in Barcelona in 1956 and obtained my undergraduate degree in Economics from the Universitat de Barcelona in 1980. I earned 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 conducting research in Economics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where I was promoted to full professor in 1994.
From 1996 to 2000, I served as chairman of the Department of Economics, during 1990-1994 and 2002-2004, I coordinated the IDEA doctoral program, and since September 2024 I am its director. I have also held editorial positions, including Co-editor of Investigaciones Económicas (1996-1999) and Associate Editor of Economics Bulletin (2001-2012), Economic Research International (2010-2017), and Review of Economic Design (2015-2019). Currently, I serve as Associate Editor for 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 have been one of its Honorary Fellows. From 2006 to 2011, I served as an elected member of the Council of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare, and I was re-elected for the 2014-2019 period. I have been an Affiliated Professor at the Barcelona School of Economics since 2006. In recognition of my research excellence, I was awarded the "ICREA Acadèmia" prize (2009-2013) by the Generalitat de Catalunya.
In 2021, I was elected a fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), and in 2022, I was honored by the Instituto de Matemática Aplicada San Luis (Argentina) as an Honorary Researcher. I served as Dean of the School of Economics and Business at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona from 2012 to 2015, and since late 2022, I have been the director of CODE, a research center at UAB.
I have had the opportunity to visit several prestigious institutions, including 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). Over the years, I have supervised ten Ph.D. students.
My research focuses on Mechanism Design, a field at the intersection of Game Theory and Social Choice Theory, which studies and designs institutions (mechanisms) to help societies make collective decisions. This research not only emphasizes the normative properties of mechanisms (such as efficiency and equity) but also considers the strategic incentives they create for agents. Recently, I have applied mechanism design tools to three areas: matching, voting, and the allocation of divisible goods.