Marco Ottaviani

Marco Ottaviani is Full Professor of Economics at Bocconi University, where he teaches Managerial Economics in the SDA Bocconi MBA program and Information Economics in core and elective courses at the PhD level. He served as Dean for Research from 2016 to 2018.

His research focuses on information and incentive problems at the crossroad of organizational economics, industrial organization, regulation and finance. Recently, he has been working on the design of prediction markets, information aggregation in organizations, incentives and regulation of information intermediaries, consumer protection and privacy, financing of innovation and grant making, incentives for collecting and reporting empirical evidence, publication bias, clinical trials and the design of approval regulation.

Marco graduated from Bocconi University in 1992 and earned a PhD in Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996. Before returning to Bocconi in 2011, he started his career as junior faculty at University College London to then become Professor of Economics at the London Business School and Professor of Strategy at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Teaching domains

• Microeconomics

Latest publications

HENRY E., LOSETO M., OTTAVIANI M. Regulation with Experimentation: Ex Ante Approval, Ex Post Withdrawal, and Liability Management Science, 2021

DI TILLIO A., OTTAVIANI M., SØRENSEN P. N. Strategic Sample Selection Econometrica, 2021, vol.89, no. 2, pp.911-953

BERGEMANN D., OTTAVIANI M. Information markets and nonmarkets in Handbook of Industrial Organization Kate Ho, Ali Hortaçsu, Alessandro Lizzeri (Eds),Elsevier, chap. 8, pp.593-672, 2021

HOFFMANN F., INDERST R., OTTAVIANI M. Persuasion Through Selective Disclosure: Implications for Marketing, Campaigning, and Privacy Regulation Management Science, 2020, vol.66, no. 11, pp.4958-4979

ADDA J. F., DECKER C., OTTAVIANI M. P-hacking in clinical trials and how incentives shape the distribution of results across phases Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the Usa (Pnas), 2020, vol.117, no. 24, pp.13386-13392

HENRY E., OTTAVIANI M. Research and the Approval Process: The Organization of Persuasion American Economic Review, 2019, vol.109, no. 3, pp.911-955

Grants & Honors

• Excellence in Research Award - Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi , 2022
• Principal Investigator, Designing Institutions to Evaluate Ideas (EVALIDEA), 2012-2017 - European Research Council , 2012
• Robert F. Lanzillotti Prize for Best Paper in Antitrust Economics, International Industrial Organization Conference , 2009
• Economic and Social Research Council, Research Grant #RES-000-22-0385, “Economic Policies for the Transition to Digital Television,” 2003-2004 , 2003
• Research Material and Development Grants, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 - London Business School , 2003
• Scholarship for Graduate Studies in Economics, 1995-1996 - Banco di Sicilia , 1995
• “Marco Fanno” Scholarship for Graduate Studies in Economics, 1993-1994 and 1994-1995 - Mediocredito Centrale , 1993
• Summer Research Grant 1993 and 1994 - The World Economic Laboratory - MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology , 1993
• Scholarship for Graduate Studies in Economics, 1992-1993 - Cassa di Risparmio di Venezia , 1992