Ian Ayres, Ph.D., Senior Expert

Ian Ayres is a Senior Expert at Empiris LLC, the William K. Townsend Professor at Yale Law School, and a Professor at Yale's School of Management. He has been ranked as one of the most prolific and most-cited law professors of his generation.

Professor Ayres is a columnist for Forbes magazine and writes for the New York Times' Freakonomics Blog. He has been a commentator on public radio’s Marketplace. His research has been featured on Primetime Live, Oprah, and Good Morning America and in Time and Vogue magazines. He currently is the editor of the Journal of Law, Economics and Organization.

Professor Ayres clerked for the Honorable James K. Logan of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. He has previously taught at Illinois, Northwestern, Stanford and Virginia law schools and has been a research fellow of the American Bar Foundation. In 2006, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His book with Greg Klass, Insincere Promises: The Law of Misrepresented Intent, won the 2006 Scribes book award “for the best work of legal scholarship published during the previous year.”

Professor Ayres has published 9 books and over 100 articles on a wide range of topics. In 2007, he published Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way to be Smart. In the spring 2005, he published three books, Straightforward: How to Mobilize Heterosexual Support for Gay Rights (Princeton University Press 2005) (with Jennifer Gerarda Brown); Optional Law: The Structure of Legal Entitlements (University of Chicago Press 2005); and Insincere Promises: The Law of Misrepresented Intent (Yale University Press 2005) (with Gregory Klass). He is also the author of Why Not?: How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small (2003) (with Barry Nalebuff); Voting with Dollars: A New Paradigm for Campaign Finance (2002) (with Bruce Ackerman) and Pervasive Prejudice?: Non-Traditional Evidence of Race and Gender Discrimination (2001).

His two most cited articles are Fair Driving: Gender and Race Discrimination in Retail Car Negotiations, 104 Harvard Law Review 817 (1991) and Filling Gaps in Incomplete Contracts: An Economic Theory of Default Rules, 99 Yale Law Journal 87 (1989) (with Robert Gertner).

He is the author of several empirical studies: Does Affirmative Action Reduce the Number of Black Lawyers?, 57 Stanford Law Review 1807 (2005) (with Richard Brooks); To Insure Prejudice: Racial Disparities in Taxicab Tipping, 114 Yale Law Journal 1613 (2005) (with Fred Vars and Nasser Zakariya); A Separate Crime of Reckless Sex, 72 University of Chicago Law Review 599 (2005) (with Katharine Baker); Shooting Down the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis, 55 Stanford Law Review 1193 (2003) (with John J. Donohue III); Measuring the Positive Externalities from Unobservable Victim Precaution: An Empirical Analysis of Lojack, 113 Quarterly Journal of Economics 43 (1998) (with Steven D. Levitt); Pursuing Deficit Reduction Through Diversity: How Affirmative Action at the FCC Increased Auction Competition, 48 Stanford Law Review 761 (1996) (with Peter Cramton); A Market Test for Race Discrimination in Bail Setting, 46 Stanford Law Review 987 (1994) (with Joel Waldfogel); and Racial Equity in Renal Transplantation: The Disparate Impact of HLA-Based Allocation, 270 Journal of American Medical Association 1352 (1993) (with Robert Gaston, Laura Dooley and Arnold Diethelm).

Professor Ayres received his B.A. in Russian studies and economics and J.D. from Yale University and his Ph.D. in economics from M.I.T.

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