Joel Waldfogel

University of Minnesota

Joel Waldfogel is the Frederick R. Kappel Chair in Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management and is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Before coming to Carlson, Waldfogel was at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School (1997-2010), where he was the Ehrenkranz Family Professor of Business and Public Policy and had served as department chair and associate vice dean. Between 1990 and 1997, he was an assistant and later an associate professor of economics at Yale University.

Waldfogel’s main research interests are industrial organization and law and economics. He has conducted empirical studies of price advertising, media markets, the operation of differentiated product markets, and issues related to digital products, including piracy, pricing, and revenue sharing. He has published over 50 articles in scholarly outlets including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the RAND Journal of Economics. He has published two books, The Tyranny of the Market: Why You Can’t Always Get What You Want (Harvard University Press, 2007) and Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays (Princeton University Press, 2009). He has also written for Slate.

Waldfogel serves on the advisory boards of two companies, Tango Card, Inc. and HowMutch. He received an A.B. in economics from Brandeis University in 1984 and a Ph.D. in economics at Stanford University in 1990.