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-world institutions. Some areas I have pioneered with my coauthors include the theory, design, and implementation of kidney-paired exchange systems, liver-paired exchange systems, reserve systems for scarce medical resource allocation, and recommendation systems for child adoption.
My research areas:
My working papers and publications are available here.
Also, an (imperfect) attempt at an area-based classification is made here.
Some of the topics that I have been 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.
- Market failures and other consequences of centralized mechanisms or regulations in two-sided matching and labor markets.
- Earlier in my career, I also worked on obtaining insights into market design using agent-based models from a complex systems perspective in economics, supplemented by human experiments.
Some background on my career:
- Nine citations and a 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 the 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’s in Economics, Bilkent University (1995) and University of Pittsburgh (1997); PhD in Economics, University of 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, which conducts almost all 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).