Navin Kartik, a renowned microeconomic theorist and political economist, has been appointed the A. Douglas Melamed Professor of Economics, effective July 1, 2026.
Kartik joined Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) in 2025 after spending 17 years at Columbia University. He received his B.A. in Economics and Mathematics from Brandeis University in 1999 and his Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University in 2004. He began his faculty career at the University of California, San Diego.
His research spans foundational theoretical subjects, such as characterizations of "incentive compatibility" and "single-crossing properties," as well as applied issues. For instance, he has modeled why political candidates take unpopular positions (to convey their integrity) and why colleges may choose to forgo information and adopt test-optional admissions policies (to manage social pressure).
Kartik is best known for his work on strategic communication, which studies how much information economic agents can credibly convey when their interests conflict with their audience's. In particular, he introduced an influential theoretical framework for how costs of lying or misrepresenting information affect communication. This connects more broadly to his varied contributions to the theory of signaling: the costly efforts people make to stand out, from test preparation to résumé polishing. In recent work, he has quantified the economic waste from such signaling. His research has been published in the foremost journals in economics, including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Review of Economic Studies.
He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on advanced economic theory, political economy, information economics, and introductory and advanced game theory. In his first year at Yale, he developed a new advanced undergraduate seminar, "Elections: Preference and Information Aggregation," and will offer it again this fall.
Kartik has received numerous grants and awards across his career in recognition of outstanding research, teaching, and advising, including multiple grants from the National Science Foundation. In 2023, he was awarded the Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award. Earlier in his career, he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and in 2010 he received the prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. He has also been a visiting faculty member at the University of Chicago and Princeton University.
When he arrived at Yale, Kartik established the Political Economy Program at Yale's Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics. The program supports theoretical and empirical research on topics ranging from voting, elections, and lobbying to the political economy of development and the interaction of public policy with political and economic power. The program is part of an effort to expand political economy at Yale, building on the university's exceptional strength in economic theory and applied economics. He was also recently appointed a research associate in the Political Economy Program of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is an elected fellow of the Econometric Society and the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory, and currently the lead editor of the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics.
