Antonio Penta is an economic theorist who joined ICREA in October 2018. He is 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 Joint Managing Editor of the Review of Economic Studies, member of the Editorial Board of the American Economic Review, Associate Editor of Decisions in Economics and Finance, Associate Faculty at the Toulouse School of Economics, and a member of the TSE Digital Center. In the past, he served as Associate Editor for the Journal of Economic Theory (2016-2024) and Theoretical Economics (2019-2024). He has been awarded an ERC-Starting Grant in 2017, and an ERC-Consolidator Grant in 2022. (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 research activities
2024 Seminars, Workshops and Conferences (Presentations):
- invited speaker, Microeconomic Theory Workshop, Univ. of Bonn (GER)
- panelist, Virtual Economic Theory Seminar, for Mobido Camara's “Eliciting Informed Preferences”.
- invited speaker, Workshop on the Econometrics and Models of Strategic Interaction, (Univ. of Naples, ITA)
- invited speaker, Inaugural Janeway Institute Microeconomic Theory Conference, (Cambridge Univ., UK)
- speaker, 2024 ASSET Conference, Venice (Italy)
- speaker, 18th AMASES Annual Conference, Ischia (Italy)
- speaker, Conference on Mechanism and Institution Design, (Corvinus Univ, Budapest, HUN)
- invited speaker, Behavioral and Experimental Seminar, University of Zurich (SUI)
- invited speaker, Economic Theory Seminar, University of Manchester (UK)
2024 Workshops and Conferences (Organizer and Panel Committee):
- organizer and panel committee, Workshop on "Coordination and Social Interactions", BSE Summer Forum, Barcelona (Spain)
- organizer and panel committee, Workshop on "Preferences and Bounded Rationality", BSE Summer Forum, Barcelona (Spain)
- Coordinator of the Economic Theory and Experimental Economics area. Econometric Society European Summer Meeting, Rotterdam (Netherlands)