William Cook Early-Career Research Fellowship/College Lectureship in Economics

Following a generous benefaction from Andrew Cook, the College is able to appoint promising early career researchers to a Research Fellowship/College Lectureship in Economics.

The appointment is for a fixed term of four years.

Andrew Cook was born in Sheffield and attended University College London, where he studied law. He graduated in 1971 and was called to the Bar at Gray's Inn in 1972. Having completed a short pupillage and a technical apprenticeship, he joined the former family firm, William Cook & Sons, whose chairman he became in 1981.

In 1996, he was made Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) by Her Majesty the Queen, in the New Year's Honours List, for services to the steel casting industry, and in 2016, he was knighted in David Cameron's Resignation Honours List.

Andrew’s son William is an alumnus of Corpus. After he graduated, Andrew decided to endow the William Cook Fellowship in Economics. Andrew was elected a Guild Fellow of the College in 2015.

The current holder of the post is Dr Oleh Stupak, whose research is focused on microeconomics and the economics of networks. Dr Stupak's primary research interest is in the application of game theory to cybersecurity, industrial espionage, and network defence problems, contributing to the emerging interdisciplinary field of economics of information security. Oleh's research currently consists of two strands. 

The first strand investigates the main drivers of industrial espionage and its effects on innovative incentives, R&D companies' profits, and the quality of new technologies. The strand currently includes two projects. The first is empirical research that analyses the relationship between the information leakage attack rate, research-intensity, and companies' data reliance. It provides new empirical evidence that research-intensive industries are particularly susceptible to information leakage attacks. Moreover, it distinguishes two industry-specific associations: high-tech manufacturing industries are prone to experience targeted attacks, while knowledge-intensive service companies are more likely to fall victim to opportunistic attacks. The second project is a theoretical study that examines a dynamic R\&D race in which competitors can conduct cyberespionage against each other. The framework demonstrates that industrial espionage has an ambiguous influence on the overall investments exerted in the race and companies' expected payoffs and might even be beneficial for the quality of innovative end-products under certain circumstances. Both studies bring new insights into a heavily understudied phenomenon and could be helpful for the development of future intellectual property and cybersecurity regulations. 

The second strand of research investigates efficient network formation in the presence of an intelligent attacker. This strand is currently represented by two projects. In the first project, Dr Stupak studies a two-player dynamic game in which the Defender and the Attacker compete in a network formation and defence game with heterogeneous vertices' values. Such a model allows for studying the trade-off between network efficiency and security. More recently, William Cook Fellow joined a team of three researchers to work on a project about optimal digital resource allocation in a firm's networked environment when it faces an external adversary. This research may provide a theoretical basis and guidance for implementing identity and access management systems for companies with high-value data. 

Previous holders of the Fellowship were Dr Jacob Bradley, currently Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Nottingham, who was the first holder of the post from 2014 to 2017, Mr Felix Grey, from 2017 to 2020, currently an Economic Adviser for the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, and Dr Sam Jindani, from 2020 to 2023, who is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the National University of Singapore.