Professor Swinkels' work has looked, among other things, at the question of how much of the value of an MBA can be traced to signaling versus education, how information is aggregated in auction and other market settings, the efficiency of auctions with many players, the design of incentive contracts with minimum wages, the design of procurement auctions when one vendor is preferred to another, and the evolutionary foundations for self control problems. His current work examines models with both adverse selection and moral hazard, and competition between principals who faces agents of unknown type.