Team

Understanding mechanism of consumer behavior using big data and models at an individual level and deriving managerial implications that are useful for CRM and 1to1 Marketing. Chosen as the top Marketing scholar in Asia-Pacific Universities 2003 by Journal of Marketing Education. President and the past editor of the Japan Institute of Marketing Science. Prof. Abe received his Ph.D. in Operations Research from MIT.

Prof. Adachi specializes in international economics and labor economics. He is particularly interested in the impact of technological innovation and globalization on labor markets. Recent projects include research on the role of industrial robots in the labor market and the design of regulatory policies for robots. He received a Ph.D. (Economics) from Yale University.

Mr. Aono has worked as a consultant. He has experience in conducting the research projects and the policy implementation projects of the ministries and government offices. He has also experience in helping clients execute a strategy plan and utilize data in their operations. He received his Master's Degree in Agriculture from the University of Tokyo.

Prof. Fujii's primary research fields are international trade and inter-firm networks. He focuses on firm heterogeneity and studies how the distribution of exporters evolves in response to various foreign shocks such as trade liberalizations and exchange rate fluctuations. Since 2021, he has also investigated COVID-19 and economy. His analyses were used in various policy-making processes in Japan. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago.

Mr. Fukunaga has experience in co-developing large-scale econometric models and specializes in analysis using machine learning and econometric methods for big data. He worked for the Bank of Japan and conducted numerous research projects contributing to price stability and financial system stability in the Financial System and Bank Examination Department and the Financial Markets Department. He was also deeply involved in financial institution practices with a focus on credit risk assessment. He then worked as a senior portfolio manager at an asset management company before assuming his current position. He received his Master's Degree in Science (Physics) from the University of Tokyo and in Applied Economics from UCLA.

Prof. Hamaaki's research area is public economics and applied econometrics. He has conducted empirical research on the household behavior, such as intergenerational asset transfers, consumption and savings, and on households’ behavioral responses to tax and social security systems. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Tokyo.

Prof. Higo has extensive experience in both research and practical work on economic statistics, particularly official statistics. Recently, he has been working on (1) expanding statistical coverage and reducing errors by redesigning statistical surveys, (2) utilizing new information sources such as administrative record information and private sector big data, and (3) upgrading methods for producing processed statistics such as GDP and price indexes. After working at the Bank of Japan and the Statistics Commission Office (Secretariat), Government of Japan, he has been in his current position since 2020.　He holds a Master's degree in Economics from the University of Michigan and a Master's degree in Geophysics from the University of Tokyo.

Mr. Hiramatsu worked at a life insurance company after he had graduated from the University of Tokyo, Faculty of Law. He experienced agency sales at a branch office. Afterwards, he was engaged in planning the operation of call centers in the planning department of the head office. He forecasted incoming calls for the call center and managed the knowledge for call center operators.

Prof. Hirose's expertise is in estimation of macroeconomic models. Prior to joining Keio University, he was an economist at the Bank of Japan, where he developed macroeconomic models for forecasting and monetary policy analysis. He has provided consulting services to policymakers, research institutions, international organizations, and central banks on how to introduce and utilize macroeconomic models. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Johns Hopkins University.

Main research interest includes corporate finance, banking, monetary policy and the Japanese economy. His book titled Corporate Financing and Governance in Japan: The Road to the Future (MIT Press, 2001) co-authored with Anil Kashyap (Booth School of Business, University of Chicago) received the Nikkei Award for the Best Economics Books in 2002. Prof. Hoshi co-authored The Japanese Economy (MIT Press, 2020) with Takatoshi Ito. A book on the political economy of the Abe administration that he edited with Phillip Lipscy has been published from Cambridge University Press in 2021. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ms. Ichihashi worked for the Bank of Japan and engaged in the analysis of financial markets, market risk management, and the financial environment in the Financial Markets Department, the Financial System and Bank Examination Department, and the Monetary Affairs Department. She was also deeply involved in conducting money market operations, planning frameworks of monetary policy measures as well as payment and settlement systems. She passed the bar exam in Japan in 2011. She received her Juris Doctor degree (J.D.) from Hitotsubashi University and her Master of Laws (LL.M.) from Columbia Law School.

Mr. Ikegami is the developer of CRAB, which is the crowd management system based on Economics. His research interest is not only the economic theory but also its beneficial implementation as a service or a product. He was the team leader of "CRAB: the crowd management system based on mechanism design and machine learning," that is an accepted program as MITOU Advanced 2019. Since 2020, he has belonged to the Ph.D. program in Economics at New York University.

Prof. Imamura's research fields are market design and matching theory. His research focuses on matching theory for diversity and fairness and its application to school admissions systems. In recent years, he has been engaged in applying market design to corporate HR. Since 2021, he has been a project researcher at the University of Tokyo Market Design Center (UTMD). He received his PhD in economics from Boston College.

Prof. Iwasaki's research has covered topics in accounting and corporate governance. He has conducted advisory work to predict accounting fraud. He graduated from Kobe University with a Ph.D. in Business Administration.

Dr. Izumi specializes in rigorous economic analyses that apply the latest academic research to competition and other practical matters. Prior to joining UTEcon, she was an economist in the Mergers and Acquisition Division of the Japan Fair Trade Commission. She has been involved in high-profile cases relating to M&A, antitrust, and labor discrimination issues. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Washington.

Prof. Kamada's areas of expertise are game theory and market design. He conducts theoretical analysis as well as applies theory to practice. In recent years, he has also started research on blockchain, which is a technology used for, e.g., Bitcoin. While publishing numerous articles in top international academic journals, he writes general-audience books: Introduction to Introduction to Game Theory, Iwanami Shoten, Publishers, and First Game Theory from 16 Years Old: 6.5 Stories that Unravel “Decision-Making in the Society”, Diamond, Inc. (both in Japanese). He earned his PhD in Economics from Harvard University in 2012.

Prof. Kawaguchi is an empirical microeconomist who works on labor, education, and urban issues. He has provided consulting service to the central and local governments and private firms on the assessment of the quality of statistics, assessment of urban development programs, and the assessment of products by using econometrics. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Michigan State University in 2002.

Prof. Kawaguchi's primary research fields are empirical industrial organization, quantitative marketing, and micro-econometrics. He combines economic models and data to make counterfactual predictions about competition policies and management and marketing strategies of firms. He got his Ph.D. in Economics from the London School of Economics.

Mr. Kawaharata's areas of expertise are big data analyses and business optimization projects based on economists' viewpoints. He is an experienced entrepreneur, and was previously a consultant at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and a senior product manager at Amazon Japan.

Prof. Kitagawa's research field is financial accounting. His research interests include the economic consequences of 1) earnings quality and 2) the strategic disclosure of management earnings forecasts. He has worked as a technical advisor on a project to develop a model to detect accounting fraud. He received his Ph.D. in Business Administration from Kobe University.

Prof. Kitao's research area is macroeconomics. She analyzes the effects of economic policies such as taxes and social security system, using macroeconomic models that incorporate heterogeneous individual and household behaviors. She worked at Goldman Sachs, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and the University of Southern California, etc. before assuming her current position in 2018. She holds a Master of Public Administration/International Development from Harvard University and a PhD in Economics from New York University.

Prof. Kojima's area of expertise is “matching theory” and its application to market design. He is best known for concrete proposals for improving the residency match and daycare seat allocation in Japan. Professor Kojima has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and received many academic prizes and honors. He is known as the most productive Japanese economist, as well as his collaboration with academic and non-academic researchers. He got his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University.

Prof. Konishi is an empirical microeconomist with expertise in environmental economics. He combines causal inference and applied microeconomics in estimating and understanding the causal effects of environmental policies. His research themes include carbon pricing, electricity markets, emissions trading, fuel economy regulations, ride sharing, and transportation electrification. Ph.D. in Agricultural and Applied Economics from University of Minnesota.

Prof. Kubo's primary research areas are industrial organization and competition policy. Before moving into academia, Kensuke worked at a US consulting firm, where he supported client firms in antitrust and other regulatory matters. Prior to that, he served as the head of the economic analysis team in the Mergers and Acquisitions Division of the Japan Fair Trade Commission. Kensuke received his Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from UC Berkeley.

Prof. Kucheryavyy's primary research fields are international trade and international macroeconomics. His secondary research field is computational economics. He specializes in quantitative assessment of economic effects of trade policies and infrastructure improvement projects using state-of-the-art modeling techniques and machine learning methods. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the Pennsylvania State University in 2015. He also holds a M.Sc. degree in Software Engineering obtained from the Novosibirsk State University.

Prof. Kuroda specializes in labor economics and personnel economics. She has conducted numerous studies using government statistics, personnel and health data, and bank data. Her recent research interests include long working hours and work style reforms, the effects of working styles on health and productivity, the relationship between health management and corporate performance, and the effects of health improvement using information technology. After working for the Bank of Japan, Hitotsubashi University, and the University of Tokyo, she has been in her current position since 2014. She has also served as a member of councils of central government ministries and agencies. She received her PhD (Business) from Keio University.

Prof. Kurokawa's primary research area is behavioral economics. He has been using experimental data from laboratory and field experiments and observational data to investigate various labor issues such as working overtime and job training, health behavior, and tax perception. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Osaka University.

Prof. Marszalec has over a decade of academic and practical market design experience from both the private and public sectors. He has advised car manufacturers on procurement auctions, and worked for three European governments to advise on auction design for 4G mobile spectrum. His recent work also covers market design for resource allocation, including auctions for fishing rights, tenders for renewable energy generation, and development of auction methods for allocation of subsidies. Daniel completed his Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Oxford.

Mr. Matsushita's area of expertise is implementation of the theories of market design and crowd management into a service or an application software. He was the lead engineer of "CRAB: the crowd management system based on mechanism design and machine learning," that is an accepted program as MITOU Advanced 2019. As of 2022, he is a Ph.D., student in Economics at University of Tokyo.

Mr. Matsuyama's primary research field is urban economics. He has worked as a consultant on regional economies to support government office, helping to understand the current state of regional economies, proposing policies, and supporting the dissemination of analytical methods. He received his Master's Degree in Economics from the University of Tokyo.

Prof. Miyakawa's primary research is on firm dynamics and financial institution. He has conducted a number of collaborative works with the private and public sectors for predicting firm dynamics (e.g., exits, growth, and fraud) as well as optimizing credit risk management. He holds multiple patents in those fields. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from UCLA.

Prof. Murooka's primary research area is incorporating insights of behavioral economics into industrial organization and contract theory. He has investigated various competition and consumer-protection policies in his academic articles, as well as served as a committee member for discussing amendments to the Consumer Contract Act. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from UC Berkeley.

Prof. Nakajima's primary research areas are game theory, decision theory and behavioral economics. His recent research constructed theoretical frameworks to identify the preference of a boundedly rational consumer and applied it to contract theory and industrial organization. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University and was a faculty member at University of Michigan before joining OCU.

Prof. Nakata conducts research in the area of macroeconomics and monetary policy. He was an economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from 2012 to 2020 where he conducted various model-based analyses for the Federal Open Market Committee. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago and New York University, respectively.

Prof. Noda's research field is market design, matching theory, and auction theory. He has aimed for solving real-world problems and conducted research that carefully discusses implementation possibility. He is always searching for a new market to be analyzed, and in recent years, he has been focusing on the economics of cryptocurrencies and smart contracts. He worked at the Vancouver School of Economics, the University of British Colombia before joining the University of Tokyo. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University.

Prof. Odahara's areas of expertise are market design, auction theory, and platform analysis. As a research manager at VisasQ Inc., he contributed to the reform and expansion of matching platform business. Since 2020, he has been working at the University of Tokyo Market Design Center (UTMD), where he manages various projects. He holds a master's degree in economics from the University of Tokyo. He was a recipient of the Ouchi Hyoue Award (best graduation thesis in the Department of Economics, the University of Tokyo).

While teaching personnel economics and personnel data analysis at a business school, Prof. Okudaira works on empirical analysis using administrative micro surveys, in addition to experimental and corporate personnel data. She conducts research from a unique perspective on a wide range of research topics, including recruitment of new graduates, minimum wages, and gender. She received her PhD in Economics from Osaka University, Japan.

Prof. Owan studies the economics of organizations and labor economics. In collaboration with the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI), he has created a “depository” of internal HR data from many large Japanese firms to study how HR practices affect the productivity and earnings of individual workers. He also runs people analytics workshops for HR managers to teach how they can utilize personnel records and internal surveys to solve managerial problems. Prior to his appointment at Waseda, Hideo taught at Washington University in St. Louis, Aoyama Gakuin University, and the University of Tokyo. He received his PhD (Business) from Stanford University.

Prof. Sato's research area is industrial organization. He has been using economic theory to investigate platform operators’ business strategies and the competition policy issues surrounding them. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from The University of Tokyo.

Mr. Shibata has worked as a consultant in helping clients analyze and utilize data in their operations. He has experience in measuring the effect of advertisement and demand forecasting on the restaurant, manufacturing, and service industries. He received his Master's Degree in Economics from the University of Tokyo.

Prof. Shigeoka's research field is applied microeconomics, especially health economics. These include analyses of how patients respond to the price of health care, how physicians react to the financial incentives, how the expansion of health insurance coverage affects utilization and supply of health care, how the repeal of federal prohibition affects infant mortality in the US, and how the introduction of face-mask mandates affect the case growth of COVID-19 in Canada. He applies state-of-art statistical techniques to many kinds of data including administrative data, survey data, and data from a laboratory experiment. He is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He obtained Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University in 2012.

Prof. Shintani's area of expertise is estimation of macroeconomic models using econometric methods and forecasting macroeconomic variables using methods of time series analysis and machine learning. He has been involved in a number of collaborative research projects at government research institutes. Before joining the Faculty of Economics in 2018, he worked at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University.

Prof. Shuto has various consulting experiences based on empirical accounting research. He has conducted numerous collaborative works and studies with central government ministries, major audit firms, rating agencies, central banks, and asset management companies. He also has patents in the same field. He received his Ph.D. in Business Administration from Kobe University.

Prof. Sunakawa's primary research fields are macroeconomics, monetary policy, and computational economics.  Previously he worked as a macroeconomist at the Bank of Japan.  He specializes in economic analysis using macroeconomic and time-series models and has knowledge of numerical analysis and programming to solve these models.  He recieved his Ph.D. in Economics from the Ohio State University.

Prof. Takasaki specializes in development economics, empirical microeconomics, field experiments, and resource economics. He has done empirical and interdisciplinary research on a wide range of topics in many developing countries by conducting household and community surveys, field experiments, and spatial analyses. He has been an advisor to developmental institutions on program evaluation. He received his Ph.D. in Agricultural and Applied Economics from the University of Wisconsin- Madison.

Prof. Takizawa specializes in productivity research using highly granular data at the firm and individual levels. She also has experience from consulting at a large number of companies in the retail, wholesale, personal services, finance, and insurance industries. In addition, she is a member of committees of the central government on issues such as productivity, intangible assets, and economic statistics. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from Hitotsubashi University.

Prof. Toyama's research fields are industrial organization and environmental economics. The primary interest is the evaluation of public and regulatory policies in industries and markets. He has conducted empirical studies on a merger case in the Korean automobile industry and cap-and-trade regulation in the US electricity industry. He also works on estimation of consumer demand models. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Northwestern University.

Prof. Uetake’s research interests are quantitative marketing, industrial organization, and applied microeconomics. He has been collaborating with several companies both in Japan and the US to measure the effectiveness of various marketing policies such as advertising, CRM, and pricing. Also, he has experience with antitrust merger analyses in the high-tech industry. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Northwestern University.

Prof. Wakamori's primary research area is empirical industrial organization, and he has evaluated various policies, such as competition and healthcare, using a structural estimation approach. Prior to joining the University of Tokyo, he worked at the Bank of Canada, conducting some research projects on a cashless economy (consumer retail payment) and the hedge fund industry. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Prof. Watanabe's areas of expertise are estimating demand, pricing, designing subscription and dynamic pricing, machine learning, and quantitative marketing. He also has expertise in the economic analysis of antitrust cases. He was head of economics at Amazon Japan before joining the University of Tokyo in 2019. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Prof. Yairi's research area includes artificial intelligence, machine learning, and probabilistic reasoning. His areas of expertise are data-driven fault detection and diagnosis, learning dynamical systems, and simultaneous estimation of states and model parameters. He received his Ph.D. in Engineering from the University of Tokyo.

Prof. Yamaguchi's areas of expertise are human resource management, labor market policies, and education and consulting experiences for both public and private sectors. Yamaguchi earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has held faculty positions at McMaster University and the University of Western Ontario in Canada before joining the University of Tokyo.

Prof. Yamasaki's research interests are deep learning, machine learning, pattern matching, and computer vision. In particular, he has been working on “attractiveness computing” that focuses on the prediction, reasoning, and even enhancement of the attractiveness of services. His work includes the impression analysis of oral presentations, advertisement and banner design support, and SNS promotion and marketing. In a collaboration project with KFC Japan, he has helped boost the number of likes on Instagram by a factor of seven. He has collaborated with more than 40 companies, worked as an AI consultant for more than 15 companies, and has more than 20 domestic and 10 international patents. He received a doctorate in engineering from the University of Tokyo.