Conference in remembrance of Professor Konrad Mierendorff

A programme for the conference can be found below:

Friday 17 June 

10:00 - 10:30 Arrival and Coffee

10:30 - 11:30 Philippe Jehiel (PSE and UCL) “Auction design with data driven misspecifications” Discussant: Andrew Ellis

11:30 - 12:30 Fabian Herweg (U Bayreuth) “Do zombies rise when interest rates fall? A relationship banking model” Discussant: Daniel Quigley

12:30 - 13:30 Lunch

13:30 - 14:30 Sarah Auster (U Bonn ) “Prolonged Learning and Hasty Stopping: the Wald Problem with Ambiguity” Discussant: Martin Cripps

14:30 - 15:30 Teddy Kim (Emory University) “Keeping the listener engaged: a dynamic model of Bayesian persuasion” Discussant: Rony Razin

15:30 - 16:00 Break

16:00 - 17:00 Yeon-Koo Che (Columbia University) “Predictive Policing” joint with Jinwoo Kim (Seoul National U) and Konrad Mierendorff (UCL) Discussant: Ran Spiegler

17:00 - 19:00 Drinks Reception and Dinner

Saturday 18 June

10:00 - 10:30 Arrival and Coffee

10:30 - 11:30 Benny Moldovanu (U Bonn) “The Optimality of Simple Insurance Policies Under Dual Utility, Random Losses and Adverse Selection” Discussant: Emre Ozdenoren

11:30 - 12:30 Alexander Westkamp (U Cologne) “Optimal Sequential Implementation” Discussant: Duarte Goncalves Dias Da Silva

12:30 - 13:30 Lunch

13:30 - 14:30 Qingmin Liu (Columbia) “A Theory of Coalitional Games of Incomplete Information with An Application to Matching” Discussant: Balazs Szentes

14:30 - 15:00 Break

15:00 - 16:00 Stephen Morris (MIT) “The Optimality of Coarse Menus” Discussant: Mark Armstrong

16:00 - 17:00 Weijie Zhong (Stanford) “The cost of optimally acquired information” Discussant: Ian Jewitt

About Konrad

Konrad will be sorely missed by his colleagues at UCL Department of Economics and throughout the wider economics world.

Konrad joined University College London (UCL) in 2014 as a Lecturer, and rose quickly through the department, becoming a Professor in 2020. He studied at the University of Bonn, receiving both his Diploma and Doctorate in Economics and graduated in 2010. He also spent time at the Paris School of Economics as a visiting doctoral student. Prior to joining UCL, he undertook academic positions at the University of Bonn, the University of Zurich and Columbia University.

During his time at UCL, Konrad was known as a kind and generous teacher. He devoted great care and attention to his research students’ work. Invariably he thought hard about what they were working on and brought out the best in them. He never dismissed a student’s work out of hand and could often detect interesting features of an idea where no one else could.

Konrad was one of the few economists who combine excellent technical skills with an outstanding ability to identify important, relevant problems. He rarely, if ever, succumbed to temptation of working on a problem for the sake of producing just an elegant mathematical construct—all of his theories are tightly connected to applications and help us better understand real-life phenomena.

He recently won a 2021 European Research Council Consolidator Grant for his proposal “Dynamic Information Acquisition, Experimentation, and Communication”. Konrad was the Associate Editor at the Journal of the European Economic Association and at the European Economic Review and was published in many top-ranked peer-reviewed journals.