Andrea holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Bologna with a thesis in Industrial Organization. Before joining the JRC, he was a social scientist at the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard and a postdoc at the Harvard Business School. He also worked at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where he led a research program to investigate the use of prizes to advance research in biology, especially in the context of cancer data science.

Andrea’s research focuses on understanding incentives, such as prize-based competition, as a way to raise productivity and spur innovation. His approach often consists of utilizing field experiments to understand better the motivations and the potential biases of people acting within online communities and inside organizations.