Antonio Penta is an economic theorist who joined ICREA in October 2018. He is also Professor of Economics at UPF and 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 member of the Editorial Board of the American Economic Review and of the Review of Economic Studies, Associate Editor of the Journal of Economic Theory and of Theoretical Economics, Associate Faculty at the Toulouse School of Economics, and a member of the TSE Digital Center. In 2017, he was awarded an ERC-Starting Grant from the European Research Council.

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. Within behavioral economics, my research has combined experimental methodology and theoretical work, and it has mostly focused on understanding individuals’ reasoning processes, and particularly the interaction between individuals’ cognitve abilities and their incentives. Most recently, I have become interested in the market for online advertisement. My research focuses on the impact of Digital Marketing Agencies on the online ad auction platforms, on agencies’s opportunities to generate surplus for their clients, and on the design of novel auction formats based on direct measures of users’ attention, combining economic theory and datascience.