Maria (Masha) Titova

Assistant Professor of Economics
Assistant Professor of Political Science (secondary)

Maria “Masha” Titova is a microeconomic theorist working at the intersection of information economics and political economy. She develops mathematical and game-theoretic models of strategic interaction, with a particular focus on how information is communicated, disclosed, and acquired. She applies these tools to elections and political institutions as well as to markets and consumer search, and while her research is primarily theoretical, some of it combines formal models with structural estimation and empirical analysis. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, the Journal of Economic Theory, and the International Journal of Industrial Organization.

At Vanderbilt, Professor Titova teaches mathematical economics and political economy. She teaches mathematical methods for Economics Ph.D. students and Political Economy of Elections (ECON 4230 / PSCI 3400), a course dual-listed in Economics and Political Science that uses game-theoretic analysis to study elections and political institutions.

Professor Titova received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, San Diego in 2021, where her advisors were Renee Bowen and Joel Sobel. She also holds an M.Sc. in Financial Economics and a B.Sc. in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from the Higher School of Economics.