Piotr Dworczak

I am a Professor of Economics in the Adenauer School of Government at the University of Cologne, a Professor in the Department of Economics at Northwestern University (on leave), and a Researcher at GRAPE. I work on Mechanism and Information Design, combining research in pure theory with more applied interests in Inequality-aware Market Design and Financial Over-the-Counter Markets.

Curriculum Vitae

dworczak.piotr@gmail.com

What’s new:

Working Papers:

■ Searchable Menus

with Frank Yang

■ Privacy for Sale: Anarchy, Ban, or Market?

with Jacopo Perego and Laura Veldkamp

■ Pareto-Improving Pricing: Why 3 Is Better Than 2

with Zi Yang Kang;
Extended abstract at EC'26 conference

■ Robust Trust

with Alex Smolin;
R&R at Quarterly Journal of Economics;
Extended abstract at EC'26 conference

■ Optimal Redistribution via Income Taxation and Market Design

with Pawel Doligalski, Mohammad Akbarpour, and Scott Kominers

■ A Price Theory of Price Gouging

with Scott Kominers;
R&R at Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics

■ Optimal Membership Design

with Marco Reuter, Scott Kominers, and Changhwa Lee;
Extended abstract at EC'25 conference

■ A mechanism-design approach to property rights

with Ellen Muir;
conditionally accepted at Econometrica;
Extended abstract at EC'24 conference

■ Optimal Transparency in Over-the-Counter Markets (Online Appendix)

with Maren Vairo;
R&R at American Economic Review

■ A market-design response to the European energy crisis

with Filip Tokarski ® Mohammad Akbarpour ® Scott Kominers

■ Are Simple Mechanisms Optimal when Agents are Unsophisticated?

with Jiangtao Li;
R&R at American Economic Review;
Extended abstract at EC'21 conference

Publications:

■ Comparison of Screening Devices

with Frank Yang and Mohammad Akbarpour;
accepted at Journal of Political Economy;
Extended abstract at EC'23 conference

■ How to Allocate Money? (formerly Equity-efficiency trade-off in quasi-linear environments)

AEJ: Microeconomics, Volume 18, Number 1, February 2026

■ Incentive separability

with Pawel Doligalski, Joanna Krysta, and Filip Tokarski;
Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics, Volume 3, Number 3, August 2025

■ The Persuasion Duality

with Anton Kolotilin;
Theoretical Economics, Volume 19, Number 4, November 2024

■ Inequality and Market Design

ACM SIGecom Exchanges, Volume 22.1, June 2024

■ Redistributive Allocation Mechanisms

with Mohammad Akbarpour ® Scott Kominers;
Journal of Political Economy, Volume 132, Number 6, June 2024

■ An Economic Framework for Vaccine Prioritization

with Mohammad Akbarpour ® Eric Budish ® Scott Kominers;
Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 139, Issue 1, February 2024

■ Preparing for the Worst but Hoping for the Best: Robust (Bayesian) Persuasion

with Alessandro Pavan;
Econometrica, Volume 90, Issue 5, September 2022

■ Redistribution through Markets

with Scott Kominers ® Mohammad Akbarpour;
Econometrica, Volume 89, Issue 4, July 2021

■ Deferred Acceptance with Compensation Chains [Older version with additional results]

Operations Research, Volume 69, Issue 2, March-April 2021;
Best Paper with Student Lead Author award at the EC'16 conference [EC version]

■ Robust Benchmark Design

with Darrell Duffie
Journal of Financial Economics, Volume 142, Issue 2, November 2021;
Awarded second-place Fama-DFA award;
A non-technical summary at VOX: Robust Financial Market Benchmarks

■ Discovering Auctions: Contributions of Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson

with Alexander Teytelboym ® Shengwu Li ® Scott Kominers ® Mohammad Akbarpour;
Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Volume 123, Issue 3, July 2021

■ Modelling and optimisation in European Kidney Exchange Programmes

with Péter Biró, Joris van der Klundert, David Manlove et al.;
European Journal of Operational Research, Volume 291, Issue 2, June 2021

■ Mechanism Design with Aftermarkets: Cutoff Mechanisms [Online Appendix] [Older version]

Econometrica, Volume 88, Issue 6, November 2020

■ The Simple Economics of Optimal Persuasion

with Giorgio Martini;
Journal of Political Economy, Volume 127, Number 5, October 2019 (lead article)

■ Implementability, Walrasian Equilibria, and Efficient Matchings

with Anthony Zhang;
Economics Letters, Volume 153, April 2017

■ Benchmarks in Search Markets [Online Appendix]

with Darrell Duffie and Haoxiang Zhu;
Journal of Finance, Volume72, Issue5 October 2017;
Awarded the Amundi Smith Breeden First Prize;
A non-technical summary at VOX: In Support of Transparent Financial Benchmarks

Permanent working papers:

■ Mechanism Design with Aftermarkets: Optimal Mechanisms under Binary Actions [Online Appendix]

■ Mechanism Design with Aftermarkets: On the Impossibility of Pure Information Intermediation

■ The Effects of Post-Auction Bargaining between Bidders [Online Appendix]