Klijn, Flip

Flip Klijn is a microeconomic theorist specializing in game theory, matching theory, and market design. His most recent work focuses on non-monetary exchange markets (generalized Shapley-Scarf markets), e.g., kidney exchange programs, time banks, and the Erasmus program for the exchange of students. His fundamental contributions include axiomatic characterizations and incentive analysis of centralized mechanisms, identifying the key principles these mechanisms satisfy and providing insights into their fairness, efficiency, and strategic properties.

Using both theoretical and experimental methods, Klijn has also explored the working of centralized mechanisms for two-sided matching markets such as public school choice and professional labor markets. More specifically, he has investigated affirmative action policies and minimal-access rights, compared static versus dynamic mechanisms, and examined how preference intensities and risk aversion shape the resulting matches.

Flip Klijn earned his Ph.D. in Economics from Tilburg University (NL) in 2000. He holds an M.Sc. in Mathematics from Radboud University Nijmegen (NL). Before his tenure at IAE in 2007, he was a “Marie Skłodowska-Curie” Post-doc at UAB and a “Ramón y Cajal” Post-doc at IAE.

Klijn held a research fellowship at Harvard Business School from 2009 to 2010, invited by Alvin Roth (awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2012). He has also been a visiting research chair at the Aix-Marseille School of Economics and Innsbruck University. Klijn’s extensive body of research includes publications in journals such as American Economic Review, Mathematics of Operations Research, Journal of Economic Theory, and Games and Economic Behavior. As the principal investigator of several national, publicly funded research projects, he has collaborated with researchers across Europe and the Americas, contributing to interdisciplinary initiatives.

As an active member of the academic community, Klijn has presented his work at numerous international conferences and delivered many invited seminars. He has served on the management committee of COST Actions and is also a member of both the Spanish Network of Social Choice and the European network “Matching in Practice”.

His recent co-authored paper on kidney exchange programs, published in Mathematics of Operations Research, won the 2024 SEIO-FBBVA Award for Best Applied Contribution in Operations Research. Finally, Klijn co-authored a report for the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science on the proposal for a new centralized university admission system in the Netherlands.