Lones Smith, was an assistant and associate professor at MIT from 1991-1998, an associate and full professor at Michigan from 1998-1010, and has since been a full professor at Wisconsin. He was on the Review of Economic Studies Tour in 1991, and is a Fellow of the Econometric Society. He has been continuously funded by the National Science Foundation since 1995. His research contributions to economics to date lie in three areas. In search and matching theory, he has discovered the conditions for sorting of individuals into matches, given search or information frictions.

Andy Newman is Professor of Economics at Boston University; previously he held posts at University College London, Columbia and Northwestern. He works in a number of areas of economic theory pertinent to understanding inequality, including economic development, matching theory and organizational economics. He pioneered the use of contract theory in the analysis of income distribution and developed the concept of an inequality trap. He has also studied the interaction between the internal organization of firms and the distributions of wealth and income.