Cole Williams, assistant professor of economics, joined Nebraska Business from Durham University, where he served as an assistant professor teaching courses in industrial organization and game theory. He earned his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Irvine, and a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of California, Riverside.

He previously served as a postdoctoral researcher in economics at the University of Vienna, where he worked on two Austrian Science Fund Projects. They included Information Acquisition, Diffusion and Disclosure in Markets and Pricing in Imperfectly Competitive Markets. He also taught a course on incentives and strategic behavior.

Williams researches digital economics, social learning and the economics of culture and identity. He published "Affirmative Action with Multidimensional Identities" in Management Science, "Echo Chambers: Social Learning Under Unobserved Heterogeneity" in The Economic Journal and "Consumer Search and Product Returns in E-Commerce" in the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics.

He presented at the United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority, the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory in Paris and Tinbergen Institute Conference in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Williams organized the Theory & Policy in the Digital Economy Workshop and the DREAM Theory Conference at Durham and served as a referee for many journals including The Economic Journal, The RAND Journal of Economics and Journal of Economic Theory.