Eric Budish

Eric Budish is Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business. Budish is an applied micro-economist and game theorist who researches market design: designing the “rules of the game” in a market so that self-interested behavior by market participants leads to economically attractive outcomes. Budish writes “I am motivated by the idea that my work can improve the efficacy of real-world market institutions.”

Budish’s research has spanned a wide variety of market design contexts, including the design of financial exchanges, markets for scheduling students to courses and workers to shifts, patent design and R&D incentives, internet auctions, school choice procedures, and the market for event tickets. Budish’s best known work, on the design of financial exchanges, shows that the high-frequency trading arms race is actually just a symptom of an underlying market design flaw, and proposes a new market design called frequent batch auctions that directly solves the problem. This work was recognized with the 2014 AQR Insight Award and the 2015 Utah WFC best paper award, and has been presented to major exchanges, high-frequency trading firms, broker-dealers, investors, and regulators. SEC Chair Mary Jo White and New York AG Eric Schneiderman discussed Budish’s design proposal in major policy speeches. Budish’s dissertation research concerned the matching problem of assigning students to schedules of courses, or workers to schedules of shifts. Budish’s proposed design, which applies price-theoretic competitive equilibrium ideas to a matching market, was recently adopted for use in practice by the Wharton School for MBA course allocation. Budish’s research on patent design, together with a health economist and patent scholar, shows that the patent system inadvertently under-incentivizes long horizon R&D for cancer drugs, and won the 2013 Kauffman/iHEA Award for Health Care Entrepreneurship and Innovation Research.

Budish received his PhD in Business Economics from Harvard University before joining Chicago Booth in 2009. He received a BA in Economics and Philosophy from Amherst College and an M.Phil. in Economics from Oxford (Nuffield College), where he was a Marshall Scholar. Prior to graduate school, Budish worked at Goldman Sachs as an analyst in the mergers and acquisitions group. In 2015 Budish was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship.