David Besanko

About

David Besanko is the IBM Professor of Regulation and Competitive Practice at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He is a graduate of Northwestern University, where he received his Ph.D. in Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences in 1982, and Ohio University, where he earned his BA in Political Science in 1977. Prior to joining Kellogg in 1991, he was a faculty member at Indiana University’s School of Business and worked at Bell Communications Research. His teaching at Kellogg includes courses in public economics and infrastructure strategy. Besanko's research covers topics relating to the intersection of competitive strategy and public policy, the economics of regulation, and the theory of the firm. He has published over 50 articles in leading journals such as the American Economic Review, Econometrica, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. He is also a co-author of the book 'Corporate Reputation and Social Activism' and the widely used textbook 'Microeconomics.' Throughout his career, he has received numerous teaching awards, including the Aspen Institute's Faculty Pioneer Award in 2015, and has been recognized multiple times with the Kellogg School's top teaching honors. He has served in various administrative roles at Kellogg, including Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, and has been actively involved in editorial positions for academic journals.

Research topics

• Business
• Public economics
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Economics
• Computer Security
• Microeconomics
• Law and economics
• Macroeconomics
• Public administration

Selected publications

• Learning-by-Doing, Organizational Forgetting, and Industry Dynamics

  ScholarlyCommons (University of Pennsylvania) · 2018-06-30 · 41 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Learning-by-doing and organizational forgetting have been shown to be important in a variety of industrial settings. This paper provides a general model of dynamic competition that accounts for these economic fundamentals and shows how they shape industry structure and dynamics. Previously obtained results regarding the dominance properties of ¯rms' pricing behavior no longer hold in this more general setting. We show that forgetting does not simply negate learning. Rather, learning and forgetti…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Corporate Reputation and Social Activism

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2019-09-18 · 20 citations

  book

  This book presents a theory of corporate campaigns in which activists use campaigns as a means of harming a firm’s reputation in hope of motivating it to increase its private regulation—corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities aimed at reducing negative externalities or other forms of social harm caused by the firm. The analysis is dynamic in nature because interactions between activists and firms unfold over time. This captures the idea that a firm’s reputation is an asset that can be b…

  PublisherDOI

• Insurance access and demand response: Pricing and welfare implications

  Journal of Health Economics · 2020 · 18 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• How Efficient Is Dynamic Competition? The Case of Price as Investment

  American Economic Review · 2019-08-29 · 18 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We study industries where the price that a firm sets serves as an investment into lower cost or higher demand. We assess the welfare implications of the ensuing competition for the market using analytical and numerical approaches to compare the equilibria of a learning-by-doing model to the first-best planner solution. We show that dynamic competition leads to low deadweight loss. This cannot be attributed to similarity between the equilibria and the planner solution. Instead, we show how learni…

  PublisherDOI

• Regulated versus negotiated access pricing in vertically separated railway systems

  Journal of Regulatory Economics · 2019-02-01 · 11 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ulrich Doraszelski

  University of Pennsylvania

  27 shared

• Yaroslav Kryukov

  University of Pittsburgh Medical Center

  11 shared

• Daniel F. Spulber

  Northwestern University

  10 shared

• Daniel Diermeier

  Vanderbilt University

  9 shared

• Mark Shanley

  University of Illinois Chicago

  9 shared

• Mark A. Satterthwaite

  Northwestern University

  8 shared

• David P. Baron

  Stanford University

  8 shared

• Nabil I. Al‐Najjar

  Kellogg's (Canada)

  7 shared

Awards & honors

• Aspen Institute's Faculty Pioneer Award (2015)
• L.G. Lavengood Professor of the Year Award (1995, 2010, 2016…
• Alumni Choice Teaching Award (2006)
• Sidney J. Levy Teaching Award (1998, 2000, 2009, 2011, 2013,…
• Chair's Core Teaching Award (1999, 2001, 2003, 2005)

Similar researchers at Northwestern University

• Dean Karlanh-97
• Mark Finnh-95
• Torben Gustav Andersenh-85