Piotr Dworczak previously was a tenured Associate Professor of Economics at Northwestern University. Within the ASG's Faculty Network, he is now its first core faculty member. His research focuses on mechanism and information design.
“Piotr's research asks how markets and institutions can be designed for the public interest – the question at the heart of the ASG. We are delighted that he is joining us at this early stage and helping to shape the school from the start.”
— Professor Axel Ockenfels, Director of the ASG
Research
Mechanism design studies how the rules of markets and institutions can be designed to achieve social objectives. A central theme of Dworczak's research is how those rules should be shaped when policymakers are concerned not only with economic efficiency but also the distribution of resources and opportunities. In his work on inequality-aware market design, Dworczak and his co-authors develop tools for incorporating distributional concerns directly into the design of markets. This work shows, among other things, when policies such as price regulation, rationing, or targeted allocation can improve social welfare despite their conventional efficiency costs. Applications include the allocation of vaccines during a pandemic, the regulation of energy prices, and the relationship between taxation and market design.
A second strand of his research concerns the role of information in markets and institutions. With Darrell Duffie, he studied how financial benchmarks can be designed to remain reliable in the presence of manipulation, a question motivated by the LIBOR scandal. More recent work studies how information should be governed when the interests of different parties are imperfectly aligned, including the design of markets for personal data and decisions about when to rely on advice from potentially misaligned AI systems.
Alongside his research, Dworczak will teach in the ASG's planned Master's Program in Public Governance, which is set to welcome its first students in the winter semester 2027/28.
“I am excited to join the ASG because the ultimate ambition of my research is to shape how we think about markets and economic institutions. The ASG offers a unique environment to combine rigorous academic research with policy questions—and to bring those ideas into the classroom for people who will go on to shape public policy.”
— Piotr Dworczak
About Piotr Dworczak
Piotr Dworczak studied mathematics at the University of Warsaw and economics at the Warsaw School of Economics, and received his PhD from Stanford University's Graduate School of Business in 2017. He joined Northwestern University in 2018 and became a tenured Associate Professor there in 2022. He is a researcher at GRAPE (Group for Research in Applied Economics) in Warsaw. His work has appeared in journals including Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Journal of Finance. He is Co-Editor of Economic Theory and an Associate Editor of Econometrica, and holds an ERC Starting Grant and a Sloan Research Fellowship (2022–24).
The professorship is held in the University of Cologne's Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences and dedicated to the ASG. His research and full CV are available on his website.