Massimo Motta (BSc Bocconi, Milan, 1987; PhD Louvain, 1991) is Research Professor at ICREA, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) and Barcelona School of Economics, since 2010. He was Chief Economist at the European Commission in 2013-2016, where he coordinated the EC's economic analysis on antitrust, mergers and state aid. He was previously professor at Univ. Bologna (2007-2010), European University Institute, Florence (1998-2008) and UPF (1992-1998). His research is on industrial organization, and it has been published in the top international economic journals. Massimo has also written a book on Competition Policy: Theory and Practice (Cambridge, 2004) that is the standard reference on antitrust, a (co-authored) book on Exclusionary Practices (Cambridge, 2018), and has co-edited a book on Market Investigations (Cambridge, 2021). He is the Past President of the European Association of Researchers in Industrial Economics.

Massimo's research focuses on the welfare effects of business practices. For instance, he studies exclusionary practices (eg., predation, rebates, exclusive contracts, tying, refusal to deal) that dominant firms may adopt to exclude or marginalise market rivals; and the effects of mergers and acquisitions. Such issues are very important in today's digital economies, and his research focuses on the conduct of the digital platforms: with different coauthors, he studies the acquisition of start-ups by big firms; large firms' decisions not to allow access to their platforms or to imitate third-party products and apps to disadvantage them; and the market effects of online advertising auctions. He also studies other public interventions. For instance, he analyzes the design of industrial policies to improve productivity and resilience, eg., in the form of subsidies to innovation or to local production when domestic firms are inefficient and there is a risk of supply-chain disruption.