News

CHAIR AND GRADUATE CHAIR APPOINTED
December 20, 2017


Professor Ettore Damiano

We are delighted to announce that the Agenda Committee of the Academic Board at the University has approved the appointment of Professor Ettore Damiano as Chair and Graduate Chair of the Department of Economics from January 1, 2018 to June 30, 2023.

An economic theorist working in the areas of mechanism design and information economics, Ettore Damiano has been a member of the Department of Economics faculty since 2000. In joint work with Hao Li (UBC) and Wing Suen (University of Hong Kong), he has studied the effect of costly delay in committee decision problems, and what mechanism for decision-making yields the most welfare to committee members. Insights from this work are also used to demonstrate, theoretically, how recounting procedures triggered automatically in close elections can significantly improve the informational efficiency of the election outcome.

In another line of research, Damiano and co-authors study the optimal level of information acquisition in a class of “competitive discovery” models, from patent races to team collaboration models. They also study what design of reward structure yields the fastest rate of discovery and generates optimal welfare.