Biography

I grew up in the suburbs of Ottawa, Canada. I graduated from (the now closed) J.S. Woodsworth Secondary School, curiously named after a 20th century Canadian Prairie socialist politician whose movement led Canada into the world of three-party politics. My high school years were spent trying in vain to match clearly unattainable academic levels set by my brilliant older brother. But most of my time was occupied by extracurriculars ranging from full contact speed chess, to catching my 15 minutes of fame in debating, math contests and Olympiads, physics contests, and a fast fun prime time TV quiz show Reach for the Top.

I received the Governor General’s Gold Medal from Carleton University (Ottawa) as the top undergraduate student university-wide. There, I earned my honours BA in math and economics. From ages 13-22, I greatly enjoyed spending my time solving math contest problems, and placed in the top 100 on the 1986 North American Putnam Math Contest (despite a stupid 20% blunder – ha!).

I received my PhD at the historic Economics Department at the University of Chicago. This  changed me from math jock to homo economicus. While I still very much enjoy problem solving, it has been redirected to economic theory, where I derive nearly as much joy from inventing problems, as solving them. The goal is to find and formulate puzzles that are central to economics, and yet offer surprising theorems with value added over our intuition. My thesis in microeconomic theory studied repeated games and rational learning; it was graciously supervised by In-Koo Cho and Jose Scheinkman. Michael Woodford rounded out my committee.

I spent my untenured years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where I wrote some of my best work with truly exceptional students that I was blessed with the opportunity to teach. I feel extremely grateful that each of the three separate projects with Peter Norman Sorensen, Robert Shimer, and Giuseppe Moscarini yielded unrelated papers in Econometrica. I was tenured at the University of Michigan, and have been at Wisconsin since in 2010.  I have written jointly or solo about the economics of information, matching, search theory, finance, and game theory. I am interested in learning and strategic incentives. My CV is here.

I golf, swim, wake skate and kneeboard, and occasionally do Latin dancing.