Noah Myung

Education: B.S., University of California, Los Angeles; M.S., Ph.D., California Institute of Technology 

Noah Myung is Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Data Analytics and Decision Sciences area at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business and Associate Professor of Public Policy and Economics at UVA's Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy.

An experimental and behavioral economist, he studies how people and firms behave when incentives, information, and institutions collide — and how to redesign the rules when they fail. His work in game theory, market and mechanism design, and organizational economics asks why teams fail to coordinate even when interests align, what rival firms reveal to one another and expect in return, and how betrayal spreads through an organization. His research has appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, and the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.

Much of this work has direct application in public policy and business. He has designed combinatorial auction mechanisms for retention, compensation, and assignment — work developed with the Department of Defense that cuts costs while improving social welfare, and generalizes to organizations competing for scarce talent. Alongside this research, he works on technology and industrial policy, particularly the semiconductor industry, where firm strategy, industrial capacity, and national security converge.

As former Director of UVA Batten's Center for Leadership Simulation and Gaming, he built participatory computer simulations on refugee crises, pandemics, and urban sustainability. Through an annual international competition, they drew more than 1,400 students from over 400 universities in their first three years.

He teaches game theory and decision analysis at Darden. He has taught finance, economics, and data analysis to graduate and undergraduate programs. He has also designed and taught courses on national security and resource strategy to senior military and government leaders.

Myung earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in economics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and his B.S. from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he double majored in mathematics and economics. He has previously held appointments at the Naval Postgraduate School, Seoul National University, and UC Berkeley. He served as a military intelligence and psychological operations officer in the US Army and was honorably discharged.