About

Michael D. Whinston is the Sloan Fellows Professor of Management in the Applied Economics Group at MIT Sloan and a Professor of Economics in the MIT Department of Economics. He was previously the Robert E. and Emily H. King Professor of Business Institutions in the Department of Economics at Northwestern University from 1998 to 2013 and has also served as a Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Whinston is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. His research covers a variety of topics in microeconomics and industrial organization, including firm behavior in oligopolistic markets, antitrust, game theory, contract and organization design, law and economics, and health economics. He is a coauthor of leading graduate textbooks in microeconomics and has served as a coeditor of the RAND Journal of Economics and is on the editorial board of the American Economic Journals: Microeconomics. Whinston holds a BS in economics and an MBA in finance from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in economics from MIT.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Mathematics
• Econometrics
• Computer Science
• Computer Security
• Monetary economics
• Psychology
• Statistics
• Engineering
• Physics
• Geometry
• Environmental health
• Microeconomics
• Operations research
• Medicine
• Actuarial science
• Risk analysis (engineering)
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• Tying with Network Effects

  American Economic Review · 2025-12-31 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  We develop a leverage theory of tying in markets with network effects. When a monopolist in one market cannot perfectly extract surplus from consumers, tying can be a mechanism through which unexploited consumer surplus is used as a demand-side leverage to create a “quasi-installed base” advantage in another market characterized by network effects. Our mechanism does not require any precommitment to tying; rather, tying emerges as a best response that lowers the quality of tied-market rivals. While tying can lead to exclusion of tied-market rivals, it can also expand use of the tying product, leading to ambiguous welfare effects. (JEL D41, D85, K21, L15, L40)

  PublisherDOI

• Optimal Long-Term Health Insurance Contracts: Characterization, Computation, and Welfare Effects

  The Review of Economic Studies · 2023-05-11 · 27 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract Reclassification risk is a major concern in health insurance where contracts are typically 1 year in length but health shocks often persist for much longer. While most health systems with private insurers pair short-run contracts with substantial pricing regulations to reduce reclassification risk, long-term contracts with one-sided insurer commitment have significant potential to reduce reclassification risk without the negative side effects of price regulation, such as adverse selection. We theoretically characterize optimal long-term insurance contracts with one-sided commitment, extending the literature in directions necessary for studying health insurance markets. We leverage this characterization to provide a simple algorithm for computing optimal contracts from primitives. We estimate key market fundamentals using data on all under-65 privately insured consumers in Utah. We find that dynamic contracts are very effective at reducing reclassification risk for consumers who arrive at the market in good health, but they are ineffective for consumers who come to the market in bad health, demonstrating that there is a role for the government insurance of pre-market health risks. Individuals with steeply rising income profiles find front-loading costly, and thus relatively prefer ACA-type exchanges. Switching costs enhance, while myopia moderately compromises, the performance of dynamic contracts.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication package for: Optimal Long-Term Health Insurance Contracts: Characterization, Computation, and Welfare Effects

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2023-02-28

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  This is a replication package for: Ghili, S., Handel, B., Hendel, I. and Whinston, M. "Optimal Long-Term Health Insurance Contracts: Characterization, Computation, and Welfare Effects." The replication package .zip file contains a ReadMe, which provides instructions, and data matrices and code for the paper.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication package for: Optimal Long-Term Health Insurance Contracts: Characterization, Computation, and Welfare Effects

  2023-02-28

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  This is a replication package for: Ghili, S., Handel, B., Hendel, I. and Whinston, M. "Optimal Long-Term Health Insurance Contracts: Characterization, Computation, and Welfare Effects." The replication package .zip file contains a ReadMe, which provides instructions, and data matrices and code for the paper.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication package for: Optimal Long-Term Health Insurance Contracts: Characterization, Computation, and Welfare Effects

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2023-02-28

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  This is a replication package for: Ghili, S., Handel, B., Hendel, I. and Whinston, M. "Optimal Long-Term Health Insurance Contracts: Characterization, Computation, and Welfare Effects." The replication package .zip file contains a ReadMe, which provides instructions, and data matrices and code for the paper.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication package for: Optimal Long-Term Health Insurance Contracts: Characterization, Computation, and Welfare Effects

  2022-09-30

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  This is a replication package for: Ghili, S., Handel, B., Hendel, I. and Whinston, M. "Optimal Long-Term Health Insurance Contracts: Characterization, Computation, and Welfare Effects." The replication package .zip file contains a ReadMe, which provides instructions, and data matrices and code for the paper.

  PublisherDOI

• Concentration Thresholds for Horizontal Mergers

  American Economic Review · 2022 · 87 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Economics
  • Monetary economics
  • Econometrics

  Concentration-based thresholds for horizontal mergers, such as those in the US Horizontal Merger Guidelines, play a central role in merger analysis but their basis remains unclear. We show that there is both a theoretical and an empirical basis for focusing solely on the change in concentration, and ignoring its level, in screening mergers for whether their unilateral price effects will harm consumers. We also argue that current threshold levels likely are too lax, unless one expects efficiency gains of 5 percent or greater, or other factors such as entry and product repositioning to significantly constrain the exercise of market power postmerger. (JEL D43, G34, G38, K21, L13, L41)

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Optimal Targeted Lockdowns in a Multigroup SIR Model

  American Economic Review Insights · 2021-11-30 · 38 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  We study targeted lockdowns in a multigroup SIR model where infection, hospitalization, and fatality rates vary between groups—in particular between the “young,” the “middle-aged,” and the “old.” Our model enables a tractable quantitative analysis of optimal policy. For baseline parameter values for the COVID-19 pandemic applied to the US, we find that optimal policies differentially targeting risk/age groups significantly outperform optimal uniform policies and most of the gains can be realized by having stricter protective measures such as lockdowns on the more vulnerable, old group. Intuitively, a strict and long lockdown for the old both reduces infections and enables less strict lockdowns for the lower-risk groups. (JEL H51, I12, I18, J13, J14)

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Optimal Long-Term Health Insurance Contracts: Characterization, Computation, and Welfare Effects

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021-01-01 · 15 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Structural Empirical Analysis of Contracting in Vertical Markets

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2021-09-01 · 3 citations

  preprintOpen access

  This chapter presents an overview of advances in the structural analysis of contracting in vertical markets over the past fifteen years. We provide a discussion of theoretical models of contracting and bargaining that form the basis of recent empirical work, and then present common approaches used by researchers to take these models to the data. We also briefly survey the structural empirical literature on topics in vertical markets (including horizontal and vertical mergers, price discrimination, and nonlinear and exclusionary contracts), and conclude with a discussion of potential topics for future research.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Studies of Innovation and Information Exchange

  NSF · $176k · 2003–2007

Frequent coauthors

• Ilya Segal

  34 shared

• Volker Nocke

  University of Mannheim

  16 shared

• B. Douglas Bernheim

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  13 shared

• Igal Hendel

  10 shared

• Benjamin Handel

  Berkeley College

  9 shared

• Soheil Ghili

  7 shared

• Daron Acemoğlu

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  6 shared

• Ali Yürükoğlu

  Stanford University

  6 shared

Labs

• MIT Sloan Applied Economics GroupPI

Awards & honors

• Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize from the Toulouse School of Econo…
• Industrial Organization Society Distinguished Fellow Award (…
• Frisch Medal (2016)
• ACE Best Paper Award from the Association of Competition Eco…
• Robert F. Lanzillotti Prize for Best Paper in Antitrust Econ…