Scott Duke Kominers

Scott Duke Kominers is a Professor of Business Administration in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit; as well as a Faculty Affiliate of the Harvard Department of Economics and the Harvard Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications; Co-Principal Investigator of the Harvard Crypto, Fintech and Web3 Lab; and an a16z crypto Research Partner. He teaches the MBA elective courses “Making Markets” (M²) and “Building Web 3 Businesses” (BW3B), along with a doctoral course on market design. He is an Editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics and serves on the Board of Editors of the Journal of Economic Literature. His first book is The Everything Token: How NFTs and Web3 Will Transform the Way We Buy, Sell, and Create.

Please see Professor Kominers’s personal website at www.scottkom.com.

Professor Kominers’s research focuses on market design, developing economic analysis that provides practical solutions to real-world problems. He works at all stages of the economic design process—building underlying theory and technology, identifying new design applications, and working with practitioners to implement solutions to market failures. Since 2021, his research has particularly focused on blockchain-based platforms, crypto, and web3. In addition to academic journals, Professor Kominers has written extensively on these topics in practitioner venues such as Harvard Business Review and Bloomberg Opinion. He also advises companies engaged in marketplace development and design, such as Quora, Lunchclub, NCX, and OneChronos, and crypto projects including Applied Primate Engineering, FINE Digital, Hungry Wolves, koodos, 1337 Skulls, and Thingdoms. He serves on the National Leadership Council of the Society for Science & the Public and co-leads one of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity global working groups on inequality. From 2019-2023, he was Vice-Chair of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Economics and Computation (SIGecom).

Professor Kominers has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Star Family Fund, the William F. Milton Fund, the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and the Oxford Martin School, among others. He received the AMS-MAA-SIAM Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize in 2010, was named a Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow in 2015, and won the Star Family Prize for Excellence in Advising in 2016 and a Webby Award in 2018.

After receiving his AB summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in mathematics (with a minor in ethnomusicology) at Harvard University in 2009, Professor Kominers earned his AM and PhD in Business Economics at Harvard, in 2010 and 2011, respectively.  From 2011-2013, he was the inaugural Research Scholar at the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics at the University of Chicago; then from 2013-2017, he was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

Professor Kominers uses his knowledge of math, music, and puzzles to motivate students in the classroom.​