Department Welcomes Charles Hodgson

Charles Hodgson will join the Department of Economics in the fall of 2020 as an Assistant Professor. He will first serve as a Cowles Postdoctoral Associate for the 2019 academic year.

Hodgson is completing his Ph.D. at Stanford University, and has a M.Sc. in Economics and B.Sc. in Philosophy and Economics from the London School of Economics.

Hodgson’s research interests are in industrial organization and applied microeconomics. His current research focuses on exploration, search, and learning problems faced by firms and consumers.

In one recent paper, he studies the incentives faced by oil exploration firms in the presence of information spillovers between firms and draws conclusions for the optimal design of property rights over well data. A second paper investigates consumer search behavior in online retail and proposes a new model of consumer learning about preferences which rationalizes observed patterns in browsing data.