About

Nicola Persico is the John L. and Helen Kellogg Professor of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. He received his PhD in Economics from Northwestern University in 1996 and has held faculty positions at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and New York University before joining Kellogg in 2011. His research interests include contract theory, economics of organizations, political economy/design, labor economics, and microeconomics, with a focus on applying insights from these fields to understand strategic behavior and institutional design. Persico has published extensively in areas such as political economy, law and economics, and labor economics, and has served on the editorial boards of prominent economic journals including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, and the RAND Journal of Economics. He has received numerous honors, including the Sidney J. Levy Award for Excellence in Teaching and fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the Econometric Society.

Research topics

• Economics
• Computer Science
• Computer Security
• Labour economics
• Demographic economics
• Mathematics
• Business
• Microeconomics
• Mathematical economics
• Econometrics
• Marketing

Selected publications

• The Evolutionary Stability of Moral Foundations

  The Quarterly Journal of Economics · 2025-04-11 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  ABSTRACT Moral foundations theory is an influential empirical description of moral perception. According to this theory, individuals make moral judgments based on five distinct “moral foundations”: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. We provide a theory that explores the claimed evolutionary basis for these moral foundations. The theory conceptualizes these five moral foundations as specific modifications of fitness payoffs in a 2 × 2 game. We find that the five foundations are distinguishable from each other and evolutionarily stable. However, they are not a minimal set: strict subsets of the foundations suffice to describe all preferences that are evolutionarily stable. Not all evolutionarily stable foundations deliver social fitness improvement over the Nash equilibrium in the fitness game: we characterize which do. Finally, we study moral overdrive, that is, the situation in which the moral component of preferences totally dominates fitness payoffs and drives decision making entirely. While every one of the five foundations is compatible with moral overdrive in at least one fitness game, there is no fitness game in which moral overdrive is compatible with social fitness improvement. These results are partially extended to n × n games. We derive two testable implications from the theory and find empirical support for them.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Representation is not sufficient for selecting gender diversity

  Research Policy · 2024-04-17 · 11 citations

  articleOpen access

  One strategy for promoting female leaders in science and technology professions is to appoint more women to the committees that select leaders. Unfortunately, evidence from other settings, such as committees for selecting judges or professors, suggests this approach does not work. We use a natural experiment to test the idea that organizational norms supporting gender diversity are necessary for representation on “selectorates” to promote gender diversity among leaders in science and technology. Our empirical setting is the standard-setting organization that develops key protocols for Internet hardware and software. We find that when more women are randomly selected for the committee that appoints the organization's leaders, the committee appoints more female leaders, but only after a set of interventions meant to increase members' awareness of the benefits of gender diversity.

  PublisherDOI

• Representation Is Not Sufficient for Selecting Gender Diversity

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Illustrative Examples

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-11-02

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In each of the following sections a business, or an industry, was forced to use SBM to deal with a risk or seize an opportunity. Some succeeded, some failed. Each section illustrates one or more specific learning points: the learning points are mentioned at the end of each section. The chapters overall message is that SBM can be crucial to value creation or destruction.

  PublisherDOI

• How Do the Rules of the Competitive Game Change?

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-11-02

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Who makes -- and can change -- the rules of the game? In every democratic country, the political system has institutions that make and change laws and regulations. This chapter sketches out, in broad strokes, how these institutions work. In a sense, this chapter is standard civics, except that an unconventional viewpoint is adopted: that of business instead of citizens. This chapter, therefore, may be thought of as ``civics from a business perspective.

  PublisherDOI

• Effect of Business Uncertainty on Turnover

  Journal of Labor Economics · 2023-08-11 · 8 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Published online January 27, 2025

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Preemption

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-11-02

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Sometimes, it is possible for an industry to preempt government regulation by mitigating the societal concerns that prompt the government to intervene. This is desirable when government intervention is likely to be clumsy. Executing preemption is difficult. The challenge lies in the absence of enforcement power: not every industry player, and sometimes no single industry player, necessarily has an incentive to do what is desirable for the industry as a whole. And, by construction, there is no Institution with the power to impose change. This chapter studies two general settings in which this challenge exists and, nevertheless, the industry is able to achieve optimal preemption.

  PublisherDOI

• Optimal Procurement with Quality Concerns

  American Economic Review · 2023-05-31 · 10 citations

  article

  Adverse selection in procurement arises when low-cost bidders are also low-quality suppliers. We propose a mechanism called LoLA (lowball lottery auction) which, under some conditions, maximizes any combination of buyer’s and social surplus, subject to incentive compatibility, in the presence of adverse selection. The LoLA features a floor price, and a reserve price. The LoLA has a dominant strategy equilibrium that, under mild conditions, is unique. In a counterfactual analysis of Italian government auctions, we compute the gain that the government could have made, had it used the optimal procurement mechanism (a LoLA), relative to a first-price auction (the adopted format). (JEL D44, D82, H57, L14)

  PublisherDOI

• Index

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-11-02

  paratext1st authorCorresponding

  A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

  PublisherDOI

• Glossary

  2023-11-02

  other1st authorCorresponding

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Recent grants

• Racial Profiling: Theoretical, Empirical, and Legal Analysis

  NSF · $115k · 2006–2009

Frequent coauthors

• Emanuele Tarantino

  108 shared

• Bernhard Ganglmair

  107 shared

• Timothy Simcoe

  Boston University

  106 shared

• Justus Baron

  Northwestern University

  104 shared

• Decio Coviello

  38 shared

• Andrea Ichino

  29 shared

• Alessandro Lizzeri

  Princeton University

  13 shared

• Petra Todd

  12 shared

Education

• PhD, Economics

  Northwestern University

  1995

Awards & honors

• Sidney J. Levy Award for Excellence in Teaching 2024/25
• Fellow of the Econometric Society
• Chairs' Core Course Teaching Award (2017-18)
• Alfred P. Sloan research fellow (2002-2004)