Luca Nicoli
Luca Nicoli is a Research Scientist at CryptoEconLab, where he works on mechanism design, tokenomics, and incentive systems for decentralized networks. His work spans protocol economics, incentive design for decentralized networks, and game-theoretic analysis of cryptoeconomic systems. He holds a PhD in Theoretical and Computational Chemistry from Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa) and an MSc in Engineering Physics from Politecnico di Milano. He is an Editorial Board Member of the Recerts Journal of Mechanism Design for Public Goods.
Session
As autonomous AI agents begin transacting and coordinating across economic and physical environments, the rules governing their behavior will shape how power, accountability, and safety emerge in the agentic economy. This talk introduces mechanism design as a conceptual lens for this challenge, explores how blockchain primitives could serve as the substrate for encoding and enforcing rules for autonomous machines, and closes with an open question: mechanism design was built for rational actors, but are AI agents rational enough for it to work?