Yannai conducted his Ph.D. research at the Institute of Mathematics, the School of Computer Science & Engineering, and The Center for the Study of Rationality, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, advised by Prof. Noam Nisan and Prof. Sergiu Hart, as an Adams Fellow of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
He holds an M.Sc. in Math (summa cum laude) and a B.Sc. in Math, and Computer Science, and the "Amirim Science" honors program (summa cum laude, Class Valedictorian) from the same institution. He is also a professionally trained opera singer, holding a master’s as well as a bachelor’s degree in Classical Singing.
Yannai's main research interests lie in the interface between the theory of computation, economic theory, and game theory. In particular, he is interested in various aspects of complexity in mechanism design (where mechanism design is defined broadly from auctions to matching markets), including the interface between mechanism design and machine learning.
He is the recipient of the SIGecom Award for Best Presentation by a Student or Postdoctoral Researcher at EC'18.
For his PhD research, he received 2018 Michael B. Maschler Prize of the Israeli Chapter of the Game Theory Society.
