After earning his PhD at Duke in 2009, Ralph Boleslavsky became an Assistant Professor at the University of Miami Herbert Business School in Coral Gables, Florida. In 2016, he was promoted to Associate Professor and continued at Miami Herbert until he joined the IU faculty in July 2022. He lives in Indianapolis with his wife, Kristin (who is also a professor on the Indy campus) and their daughter, Selia.
After Boleslavsky’s first in-person lecture at IU, a significant fraction of the students stayed after class to introduce themselves.
“It was a great way to start off the semester and my time at IU,” says Boleslavsky, whose research uses game theory and information economics to study a wide variety of strategic interactions.
“One of the beautiful things about game theory is that it can be applied to study so many interesting real-world issues,” he says. “Its applicability is limited only by the creativity of the researcher.”
Boleslavsky’s papers cover a wide breadth of topics, including grade inflation and school competition, intervention and information in financial markets, political extremism, the informational role of protest, fraud, and manipulation of investigations.
The poet Khalil Gibrain wrote, “You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.”
Boleslavsky maintains that research is similar.
“We struggle to produce the most compelling findings that we can before releasing them, but once we put our work out into the world, we have no control over how it’s received,” he says.
Boleslavsky is grateful for IU’s students, who provide him with the opportunity to share his interests and knowledge of economics and game theory. He also appreciates IU’s faculty and staff.
“My colleagues in BEPP are brilliant, hard-working, and generous with their time, energy, & ideas. They’re incredibly helpful and supportive,” says Boleslavsky. They also have a sense of humor. Boleslavsky recalls a funny incident that happened when he attended a conference. After his paper was presented, someone pointed out that Boleslavsky’s name was misspelled. He realized that he had misspelled his name on his own paper.
“This paper had been around for several years, and my coauthor and I had looked at the title page thousands of times,” says Boleslavsky. After sharing this story with his colleagues, they created a misspelled name plate for his office.
“It took me a few weeks to notice!” he says with a chuckle.
Boleslavsky was also once the star of a meme that circulated in which he wore a funny t-shirt that baffled students. It read, “There are two types of people in the world: 1) Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data.” Then the meme stated, “Two of my classmates just asked our professor if his shirt is missing a second part.”
Aside from being part of a funny meme, Boleslavsky enjoys fitness (mainly weightlifting), reading, and watching Sci Fi. He also loves to travel (particularly to Paris), eat out (Tinker Street and Bodhi are Indy favorites), cook with his wife, and play the Switch with his daughter.
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