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, where I was advised by Nick Netzer and Georg Nöldeke.
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 (applied) microeconomic theory, covering topics such as behavioral theory, industrial organization 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, revised, November 2025)
- Time is Knowledge: What Response Times Reveal (with Shuo Liu and Nick Netzer, revised February 2026)
- A Theory of “Likes” (with Armin Schmutzler, revised May 2025)
Publications
- Startup Acquisitions: Acquihires and Talent Hoarding (with Igor Letina and Shuo Liu, European Economic Review, 2025, Vol. 178, 105103.)
- Never-ending Search for Innovation (with Igor Letina, Journal of Industrial Economics, 2025)
- 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)
- Optimal Search from Multiple Distributions with Infinite Horizon (Benkert, J.-M., G. Nöldeke and I. Letina, Economics Letters, 2018) – WP version here
- Informational Requirements of Nudging (Benkert, J.-M. and N. Netzer, Journal of Political Economy, 2018) – WP version here
Policy Publications
- Acquihires: What Economics Tells Regulators (with Igor Letina and Shuo Liu, CPI Antitrust Chronicle, December 2025) – PDF