About

Jeroen Swinkels is the Richard M. Paget Professor of Management Policy in the Strategy Department at the Kellogg School of Management. He joined Kellogg in 2009, bringing prior experience from positions at Stanford University, Kellogg, and Washington University in St. Louis. He received his PhD in Economics from Princeton University in 1990 and his undergraduate degree from Queen's University in Canada. Swinkels' research has focused on various topics including the valuation of an MBA in terms of signaling versus education, information aggregation in auction and market settings, auction efficiency with multiple players, incentive contract design with minimum wages, procurement auction design, and the evolutionary foundations of self-control problems. His recent work examines models involving both adverse selection and moral hazard, as well as competition between principals facing agents of unknown type, with a particular emphasis on healthcare insurance markets. Currently, his research explores organizational initiative and the incentives firms have to facilitate or impede employee job searches. Swinkels has been published in prominent journals such as Econometrica, the American Economic Review, the Review of Economic Studies, and the Review of Financial Studies. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society, has served as an associate editor for Econometrica, and has held positions on editorial boards including the Journal of Economic Theory and Games and Economic Behavior. Throughout his career, he has received multiple teaching awards and has held leadership roles such as department chair and member of the dean search committee at Kellogg.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Computer Security
• Microeconomics
• Economics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Actuarial science
• Engineering
• Mathematical economics
• Philosophy
• Control engineering
• Risk analysis (engineering)
• Business
• Ecology
• Finance
• Epistemology
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Equivalence and Near-Equivalence of Solutions to Principal-Agent Problems

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Enterprise Rent-A-Car in the US

  Kellogg School of Management eBooks · 2025-01-01

  book
  PublisherDOI

• Enterprise Rent-A-Car in the US

  Kellogg School of Management Cases · 2024-01-16

  article

  Little more than a year had passed since Chrissy Taylor, granddaughter of the company's founder and daughter of its longest-serving CEO, had been promoted, in December 2019, to CEO of Enterprise Holdings, the parent company of Enterprise Rent-A-Car. Taylor had spent her entire career in the family-owned business, but like all Enterprise employees, she started as a management trainee at a branch office. “Just like everybody else in our upper management, I started behind a rental counter,” Taylor said in an interview at the time of her promotion. “I worked my way up in various roles, learning the job by doing it: washing cars, picking up customers.” She was determined to continue the legacy of her family's company, which her father famously described as being committed to three things: “listening to and satisfying our customers, creating opportunities for our employees, and achieving long-term, sustainable growth.”

  PublisherDOI

• Disentangling Moral Hazard and Adverse Selection

  American Economic Review · 2023 · 29 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science

  While many real-world principal-agent problems have both moral hazard and adverse selection, existing tools largely analyze only one at a time. Do the insights from the separate analyses survive when the frictions are combined? We develop a simple method—decoupling—to study both problems at once. When decoupling works, everything we know from the separate analyses carries over, but interesting interactions also arise. We provide simple tests for whether decoupling is valid. We develop and numerically implement an algorithm to calculate the decoupled solution and check its validity. We also provide primitives for decoupling to work and analyze several extensions. (JEL D82, D86)

  PublisherDOI

• Uniqueness of Solutions to Principal-Agent Problems

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Multidimensional Screening and Menu Design in Health Insurance Markets

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2022-10-01 · 7 citations

  reportSenior author

  We study a general screening model that encompasses the problem facing a price-setting insurer offering vertically differentiated contracts to consumers with multiple dimensions of private information. We show how even with minimal assumptions on consumer valuations and costs, progress can be made to understand the solution in two ways. First, we derive conditions that any optimal menu must satisfy, and show how they can be used to shed light on insurer incentives. Second, we propose a tractable method to approximate the solution, and show how the quality of the approximation can be ex-post evaluated in any practical application. Applying our method empirically in the context of health insurance, we find that the approximation comes within one percent of the true solution. We illustrate the usefulness of the approximation for understanding the solution graphically as well as for numerically evaluating optimal policy interventions in a monopoly market. Our analysis highlights the importance of strategic insurer responses and endogenous contract characteristics in evaluating the effects of policy in these markets.

  PublisherDOI

• Multidimensional Screening and Menu Design in Health Insurance Markets

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Screening in Vertical Oligopolies

  Econometrica · 2021-01-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  A finite number of vertically differentiated firms simultaneously compete for and screen agents with private information about their payoffs. In equilibrium, higher firms serve higher types. Each firm distorts the allocation downward from the efficient level on types below a threshold, but upward above. While payoffs in this game are neither quasi‐concave nor continuous, if firms are sufficiently differentiated, then any strategy profile that satisfies a simple set of necessary conditions is a pure‐stategy equilibrium, and an equilibrium exists. A mixed‐strategy equilibrium exists even when firms are less differentiated. The welfare effects of private information are drastically different than under monopoly. The equilibrium approaches the competitive limit quickly as entry costs grow small. We solve the problem of a multi‐plant firm facing a type‐dependent outside option and use this to study the effect of mergers.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Optimal contracts with a risk‐taking agent

  Theoretical Economics · 2020 · 32 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Microeconomics
  • Computer Science

  Consider an agent who can costlessly add mean‐preserving noise to his output. To deter such risk‐taking, the principal optimally offers a contract that makes the agent's utility concave in output. If the agent is risk‐neutral and protected by limited liability, this concavity constraint binds and so linear contracts maximize profit. If the agent is risk averse, the concavity constraint might bind for some outputs but not others. We characterize the unique profit‐maximizing contract and show how deterring risk‐taking affects the insurance‐incentive trade‐off. Our logic extends to costly risk‐taking and to dynamic settings where the agent can shift output over time.

  PublisherDOI

• The no‐upward‐crossing condition, comparative statics, and the moral‐hazard problem

  Theoretical Economics · 2020-01-01 · 10 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  We define and explore no‐upward‐crossing (NUC), a condition satisfied by every parameterized family of distributions commonly used in economic applications. Under smoothness assumptions, NUC is equivalent to log‐supermodularity of the negative of the derivative of the distribution with respect to the parameter. It is characterized by a natural monotone comparative static and is central in establishing quasi‐concavity in a family of decision problems. As an application, we revisit the first‐order approach to the moral‐hazard problem. NUC simplifies the relevant conditions for the validity of the first‐order approach and gives them an economic interpretation. We provide extensive analysis of sufficient conditions for the first‐order approach for exponential families.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Larry Samuelson

  22 shared

• George J. Mailath

  University of Pennsylvania

  16 shared

• Ohad Kadan

  Arizona State University

  10 shared

• Héctor Chade

  Arizona State University

  10 shared

• Matthew O. Jackson

  9 shared

• Daniel Barron

  Kellogg's (Canada)

  7 shared

• George Georgiadis

  Northwestern University

  7 shared

• Vlad Mares

  INSEAD

  6 shared

Labs

• Management PolicyPI

Awards & honors

• EMBA Best Professor Award, Executive MBA Program, Kellogg Sc…
• Chairs Core Course Teaching Award, 2020-2021
• Chairs' Core Course Teaching Award, Kellogg School of Manage…
• Economic Theory Fellow, Society for the Advancement of Econo…
• Sidney J. Levy Teaching Award, Kellogg School of Management,…