Philipp Strack, Clark Medalist, Recognized in the Winter 2025 Journal of Economic Perspectives
Yale Economist Philipp Strack won the 2024 John Bates Clark Medal, widely considered the most prestigious award bestowed on young American economists.
In the Winter 2025 AEA Journal of Economics Perspectives (JEP), Drew Fudenberg (MIT) provides a broad overview of Strack’s work, and highlights his contributions to mechanism design, information economics, imperfect learning and behavioral economics, and risk preferences.
Philipp Strack is creative, insightful, and skillful, which has allowed him to make major contributions to many areas of microeconomic theory, including behavioral economics, information acquisition and learning, and mechanism design. Some of these papers provide a new understanding of important economics phenomena, others introduce results and techniques that will be used for years to come, and some of the papers do both. Together they have helped spark what his Clark Medal citation called a “new wave of information economics.”
— Drew Fudenberg, Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics at MIT
In the review, Paul Fudenberg underscores the importance of Professor Strack’s main lines of research:
Mechanism Design: “Philipp’s work has provided useful new tools for mechanism design and applied them to extend the analysis of mechanism design both in classic settings and some new ones."
Information Economics: “Philipp’s work has illuminated some important effects of the fact that much of peoples’ information is the result of their own decisions, and helped rekindle research on this topic. He has also made important contributions to the study of how to reveal useful information while respecting privacy constraints.”
Imperfect Learning and Behavioral Economics: “Philipp’s work on imperfect learning has provided a major step in this direction. This work has had two main focuses: learning by agents who have perfect memory but whose prior beliefs prevent them from learning the truth, and agents whose main difficulties in learning come from their imperfect memory.”
Risk Preferences: “It is important to understand how risk preferences change as additional risks are added. It is also important to understand the behavior of agents who do not maximize expected utility, but instead evaluate risks using nonlinear functions of their probabilities. Philipp has done impressive work on both topics.”
Philipp is one of the most cheerful and friendly people I know. I have greatly enjoyed working with and learning from him. He is also extraordinarily productive: as of June 2024, he had published 37 papers in the eleven years since the completion of his dissertation, with several others forthcoming…Some of Philipp’s papers provide a new understanding of important economics phenomena, others introduce results and techniques that will be used for years to come, and many do both. All of his work is clear and insightful, and its influence seems sure to expand.
— Drew Fudenberg