Leverhulme Professor of Industry and Organisation

Claudio Mezzetti is a theoretical economist whose main research interest is in mechanism design: the study and design of incentives in markets and organizations.

His main focus has been the study of conditions under which economic efficiency can be achieved in spite of the privacy of information, the ability of agents to refuse to participate, and the possible presence of informational externalities.

He has studied trading mechanisms between buyers and sellers, the property and design of auctions, especially sequential auctions, and revenue maximization, or surplus extraction, by a seller. He has contributed to the study of contractual arrangements between principals and agents. In particular, he has worked on common agency, the case when and agent provides services to more than one principal, and competition among principals for the services of one agent.

He has studied acquisition of information before a contractual agreement. He has worked on the issues relating to intellectual property, the disclosure of knowledge in patent races, and the formation of joint ventures in innovation markets.

He has also worked on game theory; in particular the evolutionary and equilibrium properties of economic and social system in which agents have bounded rationality and learn over time. One of the applications of this work is to dynamic oligopoly markets. He has looked at both convergence to Cournot equilibrium and a dynamic version of conjectural variations.

Publications

View my papers.