Yan Chen earns 2026 Market Design Impact Award

University of Michigan School of Information Daniel Kahneman Collegiate Professor of Information Yan Chen has earned the 2026 Market Design Impact Award from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). 

The award recognizes Chen’s pioneering work in behavioral market design, which combines economic theory with large-scale field experiments to improve the design of practical systems. 

"I am deeply honored to receive this award,” Chen says. “I am also incredibly grateful to all my co-authors who worked with me on these exciting and sometimes challenging research projects together. I learned so much from them."

Chen’s award citation cites her research reforming Chinese college admissions, organizing workers on ride-sharing platforms and her design of recommender systems that increased contributions to digital public goods.

Her  work examines how people make decisions within complex systems and how those systems and institutions can be designed to produce better and fairer outcomes. By incorporating insights from behavioral economics into market design, Chen studies how people respond to incentives and when their behavior differs from what neoclassical economic models predict. 

Now in its second year, the Market Design Impact Award honors major original research conducted within the past 15 years that has had a lasting direct or indirect impact on the field or practice of market design.

Chen will receive the award during the Auctions and Market Design Business Meeting at the 2026 Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) annual meeting in San Francisco. The presentation is tentatively scheduled for Monday, Nov. 2. 

RELATED 

Learn more about Yan Chen’s research by visiting her UMSI faculty profile.