I am a Professor of Economics at Boston College. My research interests are primarily in microeconomic theory on market design, matching markets, and the allocation/exchange of discrete resources. Through my research in market design, I also have an active interest in improving or designing real-life institutions. Some areas I have pioneered with my coauthors are the design and real-life implementation of kidney-paired exchange systems, liver-paired exchange systems, reserve systems in scarce medical resource allocation, and recommendation systems in child adoption.
My recent research areas:
My list of publications is available chronologically [here] with area keywords and classified according to the scientific discipline journals in my [CV]. For all my working papers, see [here] with area keywords. Some of the topics that I am recently interested in:
- The design and implementation of the living-donor organ-paired exchanges, especially for liver and kidney, and blood allocation and exchange mechanisms
- Matching with (re)assignment and their applications to tuition exchange in college admissions, teacher (re)assignment, student exchange, and student-athlete transfer, and their implications on labor markets, education, etc.
- The theory and real-life implementation of reserve systems from the pandemic resource allocation to Indian affirmative action policies.
- Theory and axiomatics of resource allocation and matching mechanisms in general.
- Improving recommendation and matching systems used in adopting children and search and matching theory with an operations management focus.
Some background on my career:
- Nine citations and name-mention in the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics in the scientific background document.
- President of the Society for Economic Design (2008-2015)
- Member of Science Academy Turkey (elected in 2014)
- Special Award of the Turkish Scientific and Research Council (TUBITAK) (2013) for scientific contributions to kidney-paired exchange (one of the three equivalent highest awards of TUBITAK)
- Honorary Ph.D., Inonu University, Turkey (2024), for my contributions to liver paired exchange.
- PI or co-PI to 5 NSF grants on unraveling in matching markets, kidney paired exchange, and liver paired exchange and an awardee of GEBIP-TUBA Turkey grant (2005).
- Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation (2023-), associate editor of the Journal of Economic Theory (2016-), advisory editor of Games and Economic Behavior (2018-), associate editor of Theoretical Economics (2012-2024) and other economics journals.
- BSc in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Bilkent University (1993); Master in Economics, Bilkent (1995) and University of Pittsburgh (1997); PhD in Economics, Pittsburgh (2000).
Real-life impact of my research in market design [more details]:
- Kidney paired exchange [more details]:
- I co-founded the New England Program for Kidney Exchange (2005), the world’s first optimized kidney-paired exchange program.
- I co-designed the Alliance for Paired Kidney Donation (2006) matching algorithm, for which I was elected as an INFORMS Edelman Laureate (2014).
- I was an at-large representative of the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) (2009-2010) on the design of the UNOS national kidney paired exchange program.
- Liver paired exchange [more details]:
- I co-founded the Banu Bedestenci Sonmez Liver-Paired Exchange System at Inonu University, Turkey (2022), the world’s first optimized liver-paired exchange program, conducting a supermajority of multi-way exchanges worldwide.
- I co-designed or helped design and implement several scarce COVID therapeutic and vaccine allocation schemes (2020-2022) [more details].
- I co-designed a recommendation system for finding adoptive families for children in Pennsylvania (2015) [more details].