Rate My Professor Ivan Balbuzanov

Ivan Balbuzanov is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics in the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Melbourne, where he joined in July 2015 after receiving his PhD in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley. He serves as the Program Director for the Economics PhD Program and is an affiliate of the Centre for Market Design. His academic career includes prior roles such as Senior Lecturer in Economics at the same institution. Balbuzanov received the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor award at UC Berkeley during 2012-2013. He teaches courses in microeconomics and game theory, contributing to both undergraduate and graduate education.

Balbuzanov's research focuses on microeconomic theory, with particular emphasis on market design, game theory, mechanism design, and strategic communication. He has published in leading journals, including The Property Rights Theory of Production Networks with Maciej H. Kotowski in Theoretical Economics (2024), which examines production and trading networks under complex property rights; Constrained Random Matching in the Journal of Economic Theory (2022), generalizing the Probabilistic Serial mechanism to constrained matching markets; Endowments, Exclusion, and Exchange with Kotowski in Econometrica (2019), proposing the exclusion core for exchange economies; Short Trading Cycles: Paired Kidney Exchange with Strict Ordinal Preferences in Mathematical Social Sciences (2020); Lies and Consequences: The Effect of Lie Detection on Communication Outcomes in the International Journal of Game Theory (2019); and Convex Strategyproofness with an Application to the Probabilistic Serial Mechanism in Social Choice and Welfare (2016). His current working papers include An Axiomatic Characterization of Draft Rules with Jacob Coreno and Incentivizing Engagement: Experimental Evidence on Journalist Performance Pay with Jared Gars, Mateusz Stalinski, and Emilia Tjernström. Balbuzanov's contributions advance understanding of allocation mechanisms, property rights, and strategic interactions, influencing fields like matching theory and network formation.