University of Michigan School of Information professors Erin Krupka and Yan Chen earned prestigious awards from the Economic Science Association (ESA). 

The awards were announced at the annual ESA World Meetings on June 7, 2025. Krupka earned the ESA Prize for Exceptional Achievement, which is awarded to one researcher every year who has “overcome unusually difficult obstacles to achieve success in their research.”

“I am honored and deeply touched to be recognized with this award,” Krupka says. “Overcoming the obstacles I faced as a young scholar would not have been possible without the support of the ESA community."

Chen earned ESA’s Distinguished Service Award. The award is meant to “recognize an individual who has played an outsized role in ESA administration over their career.” Last year, Chen was an inaugural ESA Fellow, and delivered the ESA World Meeting’s keynote address in 2024. 

"I am honored to receive the ESA Distinguished Service Award together with one of my mentors, Catherine Eckel,” Chen says. “As a mentee in the inaugural NSF/AEA mentoring program for junior women in Economics, I benefited from the advice and help from my mentors and fellow teammates. Initiating the ESA mentoring program during my presidency (2015-17) and becoming its director (2018-2024) was among the most meaningful experiences of my professional life."

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Erin Krupka is a UMSI professor and associate dean for faculty at UMSI. She recently earned a Best Published Research Paper of the Year Award from the Society of General Internal Medicine for her paper “Using Behavioral Economics to Reduce Low-Value Care Among Older Adults: A Cluster Randomized Clinical Trial.” 

Yan Chen is a Daniel Kahneman Collegiate Professor of Information and a professor of information at the School of Information and research professor at the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Institute for Social Research. Chen’s paper, “Motivating Experts to Contribute to Digital Public Goods: A Personalized Field Experiment on Wikipedia” was recently selected as one of two Best Papers published in 2024 during the May Wiki Workshop, selected from more than 200 peer-reviewed publications about Wikipedia.