February 10, 2006 | Volume 34, Number 18

Dirk Bergemann is appointed the Douglass and Marian Campbell Professor of Economics

Dirk Bergemann, the newly appointed Douglass and Marian Campbell Professor of Economics, is a top theorist of mechanism design — a sub-field of game theory that looks at ways to design the rules of a game or activity (such as an auction) to achieve a specific outcome.

Bergemann conducts joint research with colleagues at the London School of Economics, University of Munich, University of Southampton, HEC Paris (France's leading business school) and Helsinki School of Economics. His teaching and research interests focus on game theory, industrial organization, learning and information acquisition in markets, and dynamic contracts. He has written about topics ranging from the multi-armed bandit model (a statistical decision model in which individuals try to optimize their decisions while improving their information at the same time) to dynamic price competition, the financing of innovation and the value of benchmarking, among other topics.

Born in Germany, Bergemann earned a B.A. in economics and sociology at J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt and a M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania. He came to Yale in 1995 as an assistant professor, having previously served as a faculty member at Princeton University and a research associate at the Institute of Economic Analysis in Barcelona, Spain. He was named as associate professor with tenure at Yale in 2001 and as a full professor in 2003. He has been affiliated with the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics at Yale since 1996.

Since 2004, he has also served as a research fellow with CESifo, a European economic research organization consisting of the Center for Economic Studies (CES), the Ifo Institute for Economic Research and the CESifo GmbH (Munich Society for the Promotion of Economic Research). Bergemann has also held visiting posts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Bonn, Boston and Columbia universities, and he was the D.F.G. Mercator Research Professor at the University of Munich 2003–2004.

He has received several grants from the National Science Foundation to support his research. He also has been awarded fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the Sidney Wentraub Memorial Foundation and the German National Science Foundation. His other honors include the W.P. Carey Prize for Best Ph.D. in Economics from UPenn.

Bergemann is foreign editor for the Review of Economic Studies, and associate editor of several publications, including Economic Theory, Journal of Economic Theory, RAND Journal of Economics, and Theoretical Economics.