Prof. Andrea Prat, Ph.D., is Richard Paul Richman Professor of Business and Professor of Economics at the Columbia Business School of Columbia University in New York. The Italian national has made a name for himself as a productive and influential economist in the fields of industrial and organisational economics, as well as in political economics and media economics. With the award of the honorary doctorate, the University of St.Gallen pays tributes to his services to research on the impact of mass media and on the regulation of the media market with a special focus on this market’s role in the democratic process.