Welcome to my website! My name is Jean-Michel Benkert, and I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics of the University of Bern. In 2017, I obtained a PhD in Economics from the University of Zurich. Before joining the University of Bern, I held various roles in the fields of strategy and innovation in the private sector.
Within economics, my research focuses on microeconomic theory, with an emphasis on behavioral theory and mechanism design. You can access my current and past research papers below and find my Google Scholar profile here.
Working Papers
- Strategic Attribute Learning (with Ludmila Matysková and Egor Starkov, December 2024)
- Time is Knowledge: What Response Times Reveal (with Shuo Liu and Nick Netzer, revised February 2025)
- A Theory of Recommendations (with Armin Schmutzler, August 2024)
- Startup Acquisitions: Acquihires and Talent Hoarding (with Igor Letina and Shuo Liu, revised January 2025) R&R at the EER
Publications
- Never-ending Search for Innovation (with Igor Letina, Journal of Industrial Economics, 2025) Link to WP
- Bilateral Trade with Loss-Averse Agents (Benkert, J.-M., Economic Theory, 2024)
- On the Equivalence of Optimal Mechanisms with Loss and Disappointment Aversion (Benkert, J.-M., Economics Letters, 2022)
- Designing Dynamic Research Contests (Benkert, J.-M. and I. Letina, AEJ: Microeconomics, 2020)
- Informational Requirements of Nudging (Benkert, J.-M. and N. Netzer, Journal of Political Economy, 2018)
- Optimal Search from Multiple Distributions with Infinite Horizon (Benkert, J.-M., G. Nöldeke and I. Letina, Economics Letters, 2018)