Penn President Amy Guttmann and Provost Vincent Price announced the appointment of Rakesh Vohra as the University of Pennsylvania's fifteenth Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, effective August 1, 2013.
Vohra is a leading global expert in mechanism design, an innovative area of game theory that brings together economics, engineering and computer science. He will be the George A. Weiss and Lydia Bravo Weiss University Professor, and his appointment will be shared between the Department of Economics and the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science.
His economics research in mechanism design focuses on the best ways to allocate scarce resources when the information required to make the allocation is dispersed and privately held, an increasingly common condition in present-day environments. His work has been critical to the development of game, auction and pricing theory — for example, the keyword auctions central to online search engines — and spans such areas as operations research, market systems and optimal pricing mechanisms.
For more information, see Penn News.
