Charles Hodgson

Charles Hodgson joins the Department of Economics as an Assistant Professor. He previously served as a Cowles Postdoctoral Associate for the 2019 academic year. Hodgson holds a PhD from Stanford University, and has an MSc in Economics and BSc in Philosophy and Economics from the London School of Economics. Hodgson’s research interests are in industrial organization and applied microeconomics. His current research focuses on exploration, search, and learning problems faced by firms and consumers. In one recent paper, he studies the incentives faced by oil exploration firms in the presence of information spillovers between firms and draws conclusions for the optimal design of property rights over well data. A second paper investigates consumer search behavior in online retail and proposes a new model of consumer learning about preferences which rationalizes observed patterns in browsing data.