Gur Huberman is the Robert G. Kirby Professor of Behavioral Finance at Columbia Business School where he has taught since 1989. Prior to that, he taught at Tel Aviv University and at the University of Chicago. Between 1993 and 1995 he was Vice President at JP Morgan Investment Management responsible for research on quantitative equity trading. In that capacity, he also helped develop tax aware strategies for the private bank. He earned his Ph.D. (with distinction) in operations research from Yale in 1980 and his B.Sc. (cum laude) in mathematics from Tel Aviv University in 1975.

Professor Huberman’s published work is widely read and cited (A LOT), and covers a broad range in finance and economics. He contributed to the theory of equilibrium return-risk tradeoff, to the theory of contracts, to the study of individual’s portfolio selection, especially in the context of retirement savings to the theory of liquidity and trading, and to Behavior Finance. More recently he has turned his attention to FinTech and cryptocurrencies.

Professor Huberman was a founding managing editor of the International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Finance. His co-authored paper won the 2006 Journal of Finance Distinguished Paper award of the Smith-Breeden Prize. He was a member of the Academic Advisory Board of Morgan Stanley Equity Market Microstructure Research.

On joining IOTA

IOTA is a tremendous opportunity because it applies DAG (not a chain) and assigns transaction confirmation to users, not to miners. Thus, it employs a platform structure very different from that of Bitcoin. I feel very fortunate to be invited to join the Iota team. Many of the design issues are economic in nature — who pays for what, what are the incentives of the different parties, what are possible (likely) equilibrium outcomes given those incentives. It would be an economist’s dream to participate in such an enterprise.

The IOTA Foundation is thrilled to have a seminal thinker in the field of finance and economics join the research branch full time. Professor Huberman is a pioneer in a plethora of financial fields and brings an unmatched breadth of experience in the financial realm, both in practice and theory, to the Foundation. He has already been contributing to the project for a while and is now joining officially. He will assist in fleshing out fundamental concepts like Economic Clustering for scaling the Tangle off-Coordinator and into its self-sustaining state, assist on financial theory papers on how zero-fee transactions potentially disrupt old models, and plenty more. Give him a warm welcome!