Antonio Penta is an economic theorist who joined ICREA in October 2018. He is also Professor of Economics at UPF and Affiliated Professor at the Barcelona School of Economics. Prior to that, he was Assistant Professor (2010-2016) and then tenured Associate Professor (2016-2018) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He graduated in Economics from Bocconi Univ (2004), and then he obtained a M.A. (2008) and a PhD (2010) in economics from the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently Joint Managing Editor of the Review of Economic Studies, member of the Editorial Board of the American Economic Review and of the Review of Economic Studies, Associate Editor of Decisions in Economics and Finance, Associate Faculty at the Toulouse School of Economics, and a member of the TSE Digital Center. He has been awarded an ERC-Starting Grant in 2017, and an ERC-Consolidator Grant in 2022. Personal homepage: https://www.antoniopenta.eu/
Research interests
My research spans a range of areas within game theory, mechanism design, behavioral economics and auction theory. In game theory and mechanism design, most of my research has focused on questions of robustness with respect to various forms of model misspecification. I have also worked on more applied IO topics, concerning the market for online advertisement and online ad auctions, from both a theoretical and empirical perspective. Within behavioral economics, my work has been both theoretical and experimental. So far the main focus has been on understanding and modeling individuals’ reasoning processes, and particularly the interaction between their cognitve abilities and incentives, in strategic settings as well as in individual decision problems. More recently, I started a new agenda on risk preferences.
Selected publications
- Gavan MJ & Penta A 2025, 'Safe implementation', Theoretical economics, 20 - 4 - 1285 - 1322.
- Villaizán-Vallelado M, Salvatori M, Latifzadeh K, Penta A, Leiva LA & Arapakis I 2025, 'AdSight: Scalable and Accurate Quantification of User Attention in Multi-Slot Sponsored Search', Proceedings of the 48th international acm sigir conference on research and development in information retrieval, sigir 2025, - 255 - 265.