Economic Theory research in the department focuses mainly on Mechanism Design and Information Economics topics.

Questions related to the structure of socio-economic institutions, ways to improve them, and their implications for society at large motivates research in this area. More specifically, theory research concerns optimal designing rules of the game tailored to meet pre-defined objectives. Consider the example of auctions widely used to distribute rights for using spectrum, mining, and many other resources. Rules related to auctions are designed by keeping in mind objectives ranging from encouraging competition among bidders to generating maximum revenue for the auctioneer. The efficient design of management allows the achievement of well-defined objectives or at least an outcome close to the desired goal. Strategies may be affected further by the availability of information from the bidder, the auctioneer, or both. Other branches of research in Economic Theory focus on the Design of institutions that need to aggregate individual preferences (e.g., implementing a policy based on voting).

Moving away from Microeconomic Theory, which relates to the topics described above, the department researches applied mathematics and optimization theories.

​Faculty: Shraman Banerjee, Abhimanyu Khan, Anup Pramanik, Jaideep Roy, Suchismita Tarafdar