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:
- 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).