Michael Whinston

About

Michael D. Whinston is the Sloan Fellows Professor of Management in the Applied Economics Group at MIT Sloan and a Professor of Economics in the MIT Department of Economics. He was previously the Robert E. and Emily H. King Professor of Business Institutions in the Department of Economics at Northwestern University from 1998 to 2013 and has also served as a Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Whinston is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. His research covers a variety of topics in microeconomics and industrial organization, including firm behavior in oligopolistic markets, antitrust, game theory, contract and organization design, law and economics, and health economics. He is a coauthor of leading graduate textbooks in microeconomics and has served as a coeditor of the RAND Journal of Economics and is on the editorial board of the American Economic Journals: Microeconomics. Whinston holds a BS in economics and an MBA in finance from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in economics from MIT.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Mathematics
• Econometrics
• Computer Science
• Computer Security
• Monetary economics
• Psychology
• Statistics
• Engineering

Selected publications

• Internal versus External Growth in Industries with Scale Economies: A Computational Model of Optimal Merger Policy

  Journal of Political Economy · 2019-04-18 · 51 citations

  articleSenior author

  We study merger policy in a dynamic computational model in which firms can reduce costs through investment or through mergers. Firms invest or propose mergers according to the profitability of these strategies. An antitrust authority can block mergers at some cost. We examine the optimal policy for an antitrust authority that cannot commit to its future policy and approves mergers as they are proposed. We find that the optimal policy can differ substantially from a policy based on static welfare…

  PublisherDOI

• PROPERTY RIGHTS AND THE EFFICIENCY OF BARGAINING

  Journal of the European Economic Association · 2016-12-01 · 38 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  We show that efficient bargaining is impossible for a wide class of economic settings and property rights. These settings are characterized by (i) the existence of “adverse efficient opt-out types”, whose participation does not change the efficient allocation and who, when they opt out, are the worst type other agents can face, and (ii) non-existence of the “marginal core”, and its multivaluedness with a positive probability. We also examine the optimal allocation of property rights within a giv…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The "Foreclosure" Effects of Vertical Mergers*

  2016-01-01 · 16 citations

  articleSenior author

  Antitrust law has long been concerned with the potential anticompetitive effects of vertical mergers. The foreclosure doctrine states that the main purpose of an acquisition of an upstream or downstream firm is to weaken the extent of competition in either market by foreclosing competitors from that part of the market taken by the acquired firm. This doctrine has been applied in a number of leading cases, among which Brown Shoe Company vs. United States is perhaps the most widely discussed. The…

  Publisher

• Concentration Screens for Horizontal Mergers

  RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2020-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Concentration-based screens for horizontal mergers, such as those employed in the US DOJ and FTC Horizontal Merger Guidelines, play a central role in merger analysis. However, the basis for these screens, in both form and level, remains unclear. We show that there is both a theoretical and an empirical basis for focusing solely on the change in the Herfindahl index, and ignoring its level, in screening mergers for whether their unilateral effects will harm consumers. We also argue, again both th…

  OA PDF

• The Welfare Effects of Long-Term Health Insurance Contracts

  RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2017-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Reclassification risk is a major concern in health insurance. We use a rich dataset with individual-level information on health risk to empirically study one possible solution: dynamic contracts. Empirically, dynamic contracts with one-sided commitment substantially reduce the reclassification risk present with spot contracting, achieving close to the first-best for consumers with flat net income paths. Gains are smaller for consumers with net income growth, and these consumers prefer ACA-like c…

  OA PDF

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Studies of Innovation and Information Exchange

  NSF · $176k · 2003–2007

Frequent coauthors

• Ilya Segal

  34 shared

• Volker Nocke

  University of Mannheim

  16 shared

• B. Douglas Bernheim

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  13 shared

• Igal Hendel

  10 shared

• Benjamin Handel

  Berkeley College

  9 shared

• Soheil Ghili

  7 shared

• Daron Acemoğlu

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  6 shared

• Ali Yürükoğlu

  Stanford University

  6 shared

Labs

• MIT Sloan Applied Economics GroupPI

Awards & honors

• Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize from the Toulouse School of Econo…
• Industrial Organization Society Distinguished Fellow Award (…
• Frisch Medal (2016)
• ACE Best Paper Award from the Association of Competition Eco…
• Robert F. Lanzillotti Prize for Best Paper in Antitrust Econ…

Similar researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Robert S. Pindyckh-72
• Roberto Rigobonh-58
• Christopher Knittelh-54