Lanier Benkard

C. Lanier Benkard is The Gregor G. Peterson Professor and Professor of Economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he teaches courses in industrial organization and econometrics. Before coming to Stanford in 1998, he received his PhD in Economics from Yale University (1998). He has also been a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (2005-06) and the University of California at Berkeley (2006).

Professor Benkard’s research is in the areas of empirical industrial organization (IO), applied microeconomics, and econometrics, and concentrates on applying microeconomic and game theoretic models to the study of individual markets. His recent work has focused on developing methods that allow us to analyze IO models empirically. This includes theoretical work on how to estimate demand systems and dynamic oligopoly models, as well as empirical work that uses these techniques to analyze different industries. The recent empirical work includes studies of learning by doing in the commercial aircraft industry, and studies of the demand for personal computers, and of airline mergers.

Professor Benkard is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and is a member of the American Economic Association and the Econometric Society, and has organized conferences for numerous other professional organizations, including the EEA, INFORMS, NBER, SCE, and SITE.

At Stanford, Benkard teaches a course on applied statistics and decision theory in the first year MBA core, as well as PhD courses in Econometrics and Industrial Organization. He also advises PhD students, and several of his former students are now faculty at leading economics departments and business schools.