I am a Professor of Economics at Boston College. My research is in microeconomic theory, with a focus on market design, mechanism design, and game theory, especially matching markets and the allocation and exchange of discrete resources. My work in market design is closely connected to the design and improvement of real-world institutions. With my coauthors, I have helped pioneer the theory, design, and implementation of kidney- and liver-paired exchange systems, reserve systems for scarce medical resources, and recommendation systems for child adoption.
My research areas:
My working papers and publications are available here, and an (imperfect) attempt at an area-based classification is made here.
Some of the topics I have been interested in include:
- The design and implementation of living-donor organ-paired exchanges, especially for liver and kidney, as well as blood allocation and exchange mechanisms.
- Matching with (re)assignment and its applications to tuition exchange in college admissions, teacher (re)assignment, student exchange, and student-athlete transfers, with implications for education and labor markets.
- The theory and real-life implementation of reserve systems, from pandemic resource allocation to Indian affirmative action policies and the theory of priority-based entitlements in matching, including school-choice mechanisms.
- Theory and axiomatics of resource allocation and matching mechanisms in general
- Recommendation and matching systems for child adoption, and search-and-matching theory with an operations-management focus.
- Market failures and other consequences of centralized mechanisms and regulations in two-sided matching and labor markets.
- Earlier in my career, agent-based models and human-subject experiments to study market design from a complex-systems perspective in economics.
Selected honors and positions:
- Nine citations and a name mention in the scientific background document for the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics.
- President, Society for Economic Design (2008-2015); Member, 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 TUBITAK’s three highest awards).
- Honorary Ph.D., Inonu University, Turkey (2024), for contributions to liver-paired exchange.
- Editor-in-Chief, ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation (2023-present); Associate Editor, Journal of Economic Theory (2016-present); Advisory Editor, Games and Economic Behavior (2018-present); Associate Editor, Theoretical Economics (2012-2024); and other editorial roles in economics journals and Econ/CS conferences.
Real-world 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 matching algorithm for the Alliance for Paired Kidney Donation (2006) and introduced innovations for which I was elected an INFORMS Edelman Laureate (2014).
- I served as 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, which conducts almost all multi-way exchanges worldwide.
- Pandemic resource allocation (more details):
- I co-designed or helped design and implement several scarce COVID therapeutic and vaccine allocation schemes (2020-2022).
- Child adoption and recommendation systems (more details):
- I co-designed a recommendation system for finding adoptive families for children in Pennsylvania (2015).