Eric Budish to Co-Direct Market Design Working Group

Research Associate Eric Budish, the Paul G. McDermott Professor of Economics and Entrepreneurship and Centel Foundation/Robert P. Reuss Faculty Scholar at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, will become co-director of the NBER’s Working Group on Market Design at the start of 2026. He joins Michael Ostrovsky of Stanford Business School, one of the two current co-directors, and succeeds Parag Pathak of MIT, who along with Susan Athey launched the working group in 2008.

Budish, an NBER affiliate since 2015, is a research associate in the Industrial Organization Program. He has studied many central topics in market design, including the design of financial exchanges, the operation of matching markets such as the course assignment markets used by universities, and the role of patents in influencing the allocation of R&D spending. He currently co-directs the Clark Center for Global Markets at Chicago Booth. Pathak, the Class of 1922 Professor of Economics at MIT, also contributed to many distinct questions in market design, including school choice and the allocation of students to schools in large urban school districts, the distribution of health care resources during pandemic-like events, and the design of lotteries for immigration visas. He directs Blueprint Labs at MIT.