Ian Ayres

Ian Ayres is a lawyer and an economist. He is the William K. Townsend Professor at Yale Law School, and the Anne Urowsky Professorial Fellow in Law and a Professor at Yale's School of Management.

Professor Ayres is a columnist for Forbes magazine and writes for The New York Times' Freakonomics Blog. He has been a commentator on public radio's Marketplace. His research has been featured on PrimeTime Live, Oprah and Good Morning America and in Time and Vogue magazines.

In an Illinois post-conviction proceeding, Ayres convinced a court to vacate his client's death sentence.

In 2006, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His book with Greg Klass, Insincere Promises: The Law of Misrepresented Intent, won the 2006 Scribes book award "for the best work of legal scholarship published during the previous year." Professor Ayres has been ranked as one of the most prolific and most-cited law professors of his generation. See James Lindgren & Daniel Seltzer, The Most Prolific Law Professors and Faculties, 71 CHI.-KENT L. REV. 781 (1996); Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Legal Scholars, 29 J. LEGAL STUD. 409 (2000). The Chronicle of Higher Education referred to Ayres as "a law-and-economics guru."

He was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, received his B.A. (majoring in Russian studies and economics) and J.D. from Yale and his Ph.D in economics from M.I.T. Professor Ayres clerked for the Honorable James K. Logan of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. He has previously taught at Harvard, Illinois, Northwestern, Stanford and Virginia law schools and has been a research fellow of the American Bar Foundation. From 2002 to 2009, He was the editor of the Journal of Law, Economics and Organization.

Professor Ayres has published 10 books (including The New York Times best seller, Super Crunchers) and over 100 articles on a wide range of topics. In 2010, he published Lifecyle Investing (with Barry Nalebuff). In the spring 2005, he published three books, Straightforward (with Jennifer Gerarda Brown); Optional Law; and Insincere Promises (with Gregory Klass). He is also the author of Why Not? (2003) (with Barry Nalebuff); Voting with Dollars (2002) (with Bruce Ackerman) and Pervasive Prejudice? (2001).

His two most cited law review articles are Fair Driving: Gender and Race Discrimination in Retail Car Negotiations, 104 Harvard Law Review 817 (1991) and Filling Gaps in Incomplete Contracts: An Economic Theory of Default Rules, 99 Yale Law Journal 87 (1989) (with Robert Gertner).

He is the author of several empirical studies: Does Affirmative Action Reduce the Number of Black Lawyers?, 57 Stanford Law Review 1807 (2005) (with Richard Brooks); To Insure Prejudice: Racial Disparities in Taxicab Tipping, 114 Yale Law Journal 1613 (2005) (with Fred Vars and Nasser Zakariya); A Separate Crime of Reckless Sex, 72 University of Chicago Law Review 599 (2005) (with Katharine Baker); Shooting Down the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis, 55 Stanford Law Review 1193 (2003) (with John J. Donohue III); Measuring the Positive Externalities from Unobservable Victim Precaution: An Empirical Analysis of Lojack, 113 Quarterly Journal of Economics 43 (1998) (with Steven D. Levitt); Pursuing Deficit Reduction Through Diversity: How Affirmative Action at the FCC Increased Auction Competition, 48 Stanford Law Review 761 (1996) (with Peter Cramton); A Market Test for Race Discrimination in Bail Setting, 46 Stanford Law Review 987 (1994) (with Joel Waldfogel); and Racial Equity in Renal Transplantation: The Disparate Impact of HLA-Based Allocation, 270 Journal of American Medical Association 1352 (1993) (with Robert Gaston, Laura Dooley and Arnold Diethelm).