Eric Budish Photo

Prof. Eric Budish

Paul G. McDermott Professor of Economics and Entrepreneurship
Centel Foundation/Robert P. Reuss Faculty Scholar

chicago Booth Logo

I have worked on a variety of market design issues over the years, and the organization of this webpage reflects that. You will find landing pages for my work on financial market design, combinatorial assignment (aka course allocation), cryptocurrencies and blockchains, patents and innovation, ticket markets, Covid-19 and pandemic policy, and market design theory.

There is no magic formula that explains this specific collection of problems, but I tend to be drawn to issues at the intersection of economics and technology, and to problems where I feel my work can help improve real-world market institutions. I try to convey my research’s real-world impact in various public talks and podcasts, and here is a link to its academic impact as captured by google scholar.

I also tend to use a fairly broad set of methodological tools. As you will see, I am primarily a microeconomic theorist at heart, but in a lot of my work data and computation play significant roles, and I try to go deep on the relevant institutional details.

You can also find a chronological listing of all of my papers as well as landing pages for public talks, policy writing, and press. Bio and CV.

New Work and Recent Highlights

Trust at Scale: The Economic Limits of Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains

Quarterly Journal of Economics, (2025): 140, no.1, 1-62.
Lead Article
Sources for Appendix C: 51% Attacks, Crypto Thefts and Crypto Collapses to Date
June 2018 version, NBER Working Paper No. 24717
Harvard Harris Lecture: The Economics of Cryptocurrencies (November 2022)
[PDF] [Slides] [All Related Material]

R<1 as an Economic Constraint

Review of Economic Design (Special Issue: The Economics of Epidemics), Forthcoming.
Lead Article
April 1st 2020 draft: “R<1 as an Economic Constraint: Can we 'Expand the Frontier' in the Fight Against Covid-19?"
Slides, April 9th 2020 “IGM Conference on the Covid-19 Crisis”
Nov 2020 NBER Working Paper No. w28093
[PDF] [Slides] [All Related Material]

Flow Trading

Coauthors: Peter Cramton, Albert S Kyle, Jeongmin Lee, and David Malec
American Economic Review, Revise-and-Resubmit.
[PDF] [Slides] [All Related Material]

The Economic Limits of Permissionless Consensus

Coauthors: Andrew Lewis-Pye, Tim Roughgarden
The Twenty-Fifth ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC' 24), forthcoming.
Draft available at arXiv:2405.09173
Tim Roughgarden Video Presentation
[PDF] [All Related Material]

Selected Recent Publications

A Theory of Stock Exchange Competition and Innovation: Will the Market Fix the Market?

Coauthors: Robin Lee and John Shim
Journal of Political Economy, (2024): 132, no. 4, 1209-1246.
AEA/AFA Joint Luncheon Address, Will the Market Fix the Market?
Transcript, Will the Market Fix the Market?
Slides, Will the Market Fix the Market?
[PDF] [Slides] [All Related Material]

An Economic Framework for Vaccine Prioritization

Coauthors: Mohammad Akbarpour, Piotr Dworczak, and Scott Duke Kominers
The Quarterly Journal of Economics, (2024): 139, no.1, 359-417.
[PDF] [Slides] [All Related Material]

Quantifying the High-Frequency Trading “Arms Race”

Coauthors: Matteo Aquilina and Peter O'Neill
The Quarterly Journal of Economics, (2022): 137, no. 1, 493-564.
Winner -- WFA 2020 Two Sigma Award for Best Paper on Investment Management
Data and Code Appendix
Exchange Message Data Codebook
FCA Occasional Paper landing page with brief summary and links
[PDF] [Slides] [All Related Material]

Market Design to Accelerate Covid-19 Vaccine Supply

Coauthors: Juan Camilo Castillo, Amrita Ahuja, Susan Athey, Arthur Baker, Tasneem Chipty, Rachel Glennerster, Scott Duke Kominers, Michael Kremer, Greg Larson, Jean Lee, Canice Prendergast, Christopher M Snyder, Alex Tabarrok, Brandon Joel Tan, and Witold Więcek
Science, (2021): 68, no.2, 1107-1109.
Supplementary Materials
Bigger Is Better When It Comes to Vaccine Production
How Can More Covid-19 Vaccines be Made Available?
Management Conference ’21: Perspectives on COVID-19
[PDF] [Slides] [All Related Material]