Moran Koren

Research Profile

Operations & Economics scholar studying how screening/gatekeeping, allocation, and pricing shape behavior and the information managers rely on. I build game-theoretic models and experiments to design implementable mechanisms for hiring and service systems, organ/platform allocation, and data-driven screening. Published in Management Science, Theoretical Economics, Economic Theory, GEB, with ML-incentives work in ICML and NeurIPS; supported by ISF (personal & equipment) and MOST grants.

Job talk: The Gatekeeper Effect — OM mechanisms for screening under uncertainty (Management Science, 2026).

Academic Appointments

• Senior Lecturer, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (06/2025 – Present)
  • Department of Industrial Engineering and Management
  • Faculty lead for accelerated MSc programs; founded and led the 'Young Researchers (Hetz)' track (2024–2026)
• Lecturer, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (10/2022 – 06/2025)
  • Department of Industrial Engineering and Management
• Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Tel Aviv University (2021 – 2022)
  • School of Mathematical Sciences
  • Hosts: Prof. Eilon Solan and Prof. Ehud Lehrer
• Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Harvard University (2020 – 2021)
  • Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications
  • Host: Prof. Scott Duke Kominers
• Postdoctoral Research Fellow (Fulbright Scholar), Stanford University (2019 – 2020)
  • Management Science and Engineering
  • Host: Prof. Itai Ashlagi
• Ph.D. Research Intern, Cornell Tech, Social Technologies Lab (Summer 2018)
  • Social computing research on crowd-based news evaluation and online behavior.
  • Host: Prof. Mor Naaman

Publications

Journal Articles

• Koren, M. (2026). "The Gatekeeper Effect: The Implications of Pre-Screening, Self-Selection, and Bias for Hiring Processes." Management Science, 72(1), 426–441.
• Danino, G., Koren, M., & Madmon, O. (2026). "A Strategy-Proof Mechanism for Ownership Restructuring in Privately Owned Assets." Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, 35(1), 50–58.
• Berkovich, E., Shapira, S., Koren, M., Talmon, N., & Nitzan, D. (2026). "Reimagining Israel's Food System: Balancing Mediterranean Diet Recommendations with National Food Security, Sovereignty and Resilience." Israel Journal of Health Policy Research, 15(1), Article 6.
• Arieli, I., Koren, M., & Smorodinsky, R. (2024). "Information Aggregation in Large Collective Purchases." Economic Theory, 78(1), 295–345.
• Cohen, A., Deligkas, A., & Koren, M. (2023). "Learning Approximately Optimal Contracts." Theoretical Computer Science, 980, 114219.
• Arieli, I., Koren, M., & Smorodinsky, R. (2022). "The Implication of Pricing on Social Learning." Theoretical Economics, 17(4), 1761–1802.
• Koren, M. & Mueller-Frank, M. (2022). "The Welfare Costs of Informationally Efficient Prices." Games and Economic Behavior, 131, 186–196.

Refereed Conference Proceedings

• Amir, D., Hoter, B., & Koren, M. (2025). "Strategic Behavior in Crowdfunding: Insights from a Large-Scale Online Experiment." WINE 2025. (acceptance rate: 29.8%).
• Hoter, B., Koren, M., Nitzan, D., Shapira, S., & Talmon, N. (2025). "Enhancing Food Security with Blockchain: Developing a Web3 Application." IEEE ISCC 2025. (acceptance rate: 36.6%, CORE B).
• Havin, M., Wharton Kleinman, T., Koren, M., Goldstein, A., & Dover, Y. (2025). "Can (A)I Change Your Mind?" CogSci 2025. (acceptance rate: ~30%, CORE B).
• Horowitz, G., Sommer, Y., Koren, M., & Rosenfeld, N. (2024). "Classification Under Strategic Self-Selection." ICML 2024. (acceptance rate: 27.5%, CORE A*).
• Cohen, A., Deligkas, A., & Koren, M. (2022). "Learning Approximately Optimal Contracts." SAGT 2022. (acceptance rate: 41%, CORE B).
• Kang, J., Koren, M., Monachou, F., & Ashlagi, I. (2021). "Counterbalancing Learning and Strategic Incentives in Allocation Markets." NeurIPS 2021. (acceptance rate: 26%, CORE A*).
• Ban, A., & Koren, M. (2020). "Sequential Fundraising and Social Insurance." ACM EC 2020. (acceptance rate: 20%, CORE A*).

Selected Pipeline (R&R / Major Revision)

• Theorist Toolbox: Tools for Agent-Based LLM-Assisted Economic Theory Research
  — working paper; arXiv:2606.22337 (2026).
  Contribution: a verification-first protocol for doing economic theory with large language models, instantiated as three methods that differ in how the work is checked (a single disciplined pass; an adversarial prover–verifier pair; a structured multi-agent project with a reviewer gate); argues that external verification, not model capability, is the binding design variable.

• Counterbalancing Learning and Strategic Incentives in Allocation Markets
  — Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, major revision.
  Contribution: designs mechanisms that balance information acquisition and strategic incentives in dynamic allocation (e.g., organ/platform markets).

• Sequential Fundraising and Mutual Insurance
  — JPE Micro (Journal of Political Economy: Microeconomics), revise & resubmit.
  Contribution: characterizes when sequential fundraising with risk-sharing generates inefficiency and provides implementable design fixes; delivers testable comparative statics.

• Classification Under Strategic Self-Selection
  — ICML 2024; journal extension in preparation, target: Management Science / Information Systems Research.
  Contribution: entry-aware classification under endogenous applicant pools; screening rules robust to self-selection.

• A Graph-Based Mechanism for Assigning Displaced Individuals (with Y. Doron & A. Kulik)
  — working paper in preparation; targets: Management Science / Operations Research (algorithms & simulations), Economic Theory / GEB (theory framework), ACM EC / WINE (tractable subclasses).
  Contribution: introduces a graph-theoretic resettlement mechanism that partitions a weighted social network into capacity-constrained groups while minimizing severed social ties; proves the cut-minimizing assignment is stable and develops a scalable cycle-based heuristic with strong empirical performance.

• Placement Games with Threshold-Linear Congestion: A Graphical Potential-Game Approach to Decentralized Assignment (with S. Horowitz & Y. Doron)
  — working paper in preparation; targets: Management Science / Operations Research, Games and Economic Behavior.
  Contribution: models decentralized assignment of agents to localities over a weighted social network as an exact potential game with threshold-linear congestion; establishes existence and convergence of pure Nash equilibria and tight price-of-anarchy bounds for socially-aware resettlement. Extends S. Horowitz's MSc thesis.

• Donor-Hospital Concentration and Acceptance Behavior After KAS250 in Kidney Allocation (with S. Tzidkolov)
  — working paper in preparation; targets: M&SOM, Health Care Management Science.
  Contribution: center-level before/after study of the 2021 KAS250 U.S. kidney-allocation reform; measures how donor-hospital concentration (normalized HHI) shifted and links within-center diversification to declines in organ acceptance, using OPTN STAR offer data.

• Batch Offering Under Uncertainty: A Common-Value Stopping Game Model for Organ Allocation (with V. Bar Nir & Y. Cornfeld)
  — working paper; presented at ORSIS 2026 (Technion, May 12–13, 2026); targets: Management Science / Operations Research, Games and Economic Behavior.
  Contribution: casts batch offering in organ allocation as a common-value Dynkin stopping game; proves existence of a symmetric threshold equilibrium, characterizes the asymptotic barrier strategy, and shows numerically that signal accuracy dominates batch size as a welfare lever — the success of batch offering depends less on how many centers compete and more on how good their information is.

• Build the Player: Teaching Game Theory by Designing Strategic Agents
  — INFORMS Transactions on Education, submitted.
  Contribution: a pedagogical approach that teaches game theory by having students design and build strategic agents, turning equilibrium concepts into hands-on engineering of the players themselves.

• Fairness-Constrained Actor–Critic for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (with O. Sheetrit & S. Shperberg)
  — AAAI, submitted (under review).
  Contribution: develops a fairness-constrained actor–critic method for multi-agent reinforcement learning; Koren leads the economic-theory aspects of the work.

Education

• Ph.D. in Economics, Technion – IE&M (now Data and Decision Sciences), 2019
  • Advisors: Prof. Rann Smorodinsky & Prof. Itai Arieli
  • Dissertation: "Social Learning in Adaptive Environments"
  • Keiden Prize for Graduate Students (2018)
• M.A. in Economics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2015
  • Advisor: Dr. Liad Blumrosen
  • Thesis: "To Pool or Not to Pool? On Mining Competition and Transfer Fees in Bitcoin"
• B.A. in Economics & Business, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2009
  • Magna cum Laude, Dean's List for Honors Students

Research Grants & Fellowships

Competitive Research Grants

• ISF Personal Grant (2025–2026): "Pre-Filtering Mechanisms and Self-Selection", 380,000 NIS
• ISF Equipment Grant (2025–2026): Research Equipment Support, 67,500 NIS
• MOST Security, Food and Food Tech Program (2023–2026): Joint with D. Nitzan, N. Talmon, S. Shapira, 750,000 NIS total

External Non-Competitive Grants

• IDSI Projects for Social Good (2024): 20,000 NIS

University Internal Grants

• BGU Research Group Grant (2025): "Experimental Investigation of Crowdfunding Mechanisms", 12,000 NIS
• Paul Ivanier Research Grant (2025): "Adaptive Decentralized Two Regions Perimeter Control", (with A. Taitler), 7,500 USD
• BGU-CHER Grant (2025): "Market dynamics in organ procurement", (with I. Shurtz, N. Gershoni), 12,500 NIS

Awards & Fellowships

• ISF Shamir Fellowship for Returning Scientists (2021): 280,000 NIS
• Fulbright Post-doctoral Scholar (2019): $47,500
• CMSA Fellowship, Harvard (2020): $90,000
• Stanford Fellowship (2019): $30,000
• Harold & Inge Marcus Fellowship (2017)
• Technion Ph.D. Stipend (2015-2019)

Teaching

Current Courses (BGU)

• Game Theory and Applications in Engineering (Graduate)
• Game Theory and Agentic Design (Undergraduate)
• Estimation and Hypothesis Testing
• Introduction to Decision Theory (undergraduate, mandatory)

Teaching Interests & Coverage

• Microeconomic Theory (UG/MA/PhD): static & dynamic games, information economics, contract theory
• Market & Mechanism Design (UG/MA elective): auctions, matching markets, pricing & screening, platform design
• Topics in Information & Learning (seminar): social learning, experimentation, gatekeeping/screening, allocation under uncertainty

PhD Teaching & Mentoring

• Seminars/mini-courses: Information & Mechanism Design; Learning vs. Incentives; Matching & Auctions
• Methods I can supervise: game-theoretic modeling, mechanism design, theory-driven experiments (online/field)

Student Supervision

Supervising 5 MSc students on topics including organ allocation, blockchain systems, reinforcement learning, and market design.

Supervising 1 Ph.D. candidate: Yuval Peled (starting Oct 2026), researching strategic decision-making under competition in common value markets.

Curriculum Contributions

Faculty lead for accelerated MSc programs; founded and led the "Young Researchers (Hetz)" track (2024–2026).

Professional Service

Editorial & Reviewing (selected)

Ad-hoc reviewer: Review of Economics and Statistics; Review of Economic Studies; Management Science; Theoretical Economics; Artificial Intelligence.

Program Committees (selected)

The Web Conference (2026); ITCS (2026); ACM EC (2020, 2024-2025); IJCAI (2024); WINE (2021, 2024); SAGT (2023–2025); NeurIPS (2021).

Conference Organization

INFORMS Annual Meeting (2026), San Francisco — Cluster Co-Chair, Auctions and Market Design (AMD); Mid-Chain 2026 (Blockchain & Decentralized Economics), BGU — Co-Founder & Organizing Committee; Data Science, Operations and Analytics (Mind-IL 2026) — Organizing Committee; ORSIS Annual Meeting (2024) — Organizing Committee.

Professional Memberships

The Econometric Society; The Game Theory Society; American Economic Association; INFORMS; ACM; Israeli Economics Society; ORSIS (Israeli OR Society).

Selected Invited Talks & Presentations

Upcoming Invited Talks

• INFORMS Annual Meeting (October 2025), Atlanta, Georgia
• Israeli Game Theory Day (2025)

Recent Invited Presentations

• Bar-Ilan University Economics Seminar (2026) — "From Herding to Batching: Two Models of Common-Value Allocation"
• Ben-Gurion University Economics Seminar (2026) — "From Herding to Batching: Two Models of Common-Value Allocation"
• TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology (2024)
• TAU Operations Management Seminar (2024)
• Bar Ilan Game Theory Seminar (2023)
• Technion Game Theory Seminar (2022)
• Harvard CMSA Big Data Conference (2021)

Conference Presentations

Stony Brook Game Theory Festival (2025), ORSIS (2023-25), Games World Congress (2016, 2021), EC Workshop (2019), and others.

Additional

Prior industry experience: Data Scientist, Taboola (2014-2015).

News & Student Updates — BGU Game Theory & Agentic Design Research Group (LinkedIn)