Working Papers

Problem definition: We consider the mechanism design problem of finding an optimal pay-as-bid mechanism in which the platform chooses an assortment of suppliers that balances the tradeoff between two objectives: providing enough…

SCP Annual Conference Best Competitive Paper Award, Runner Up, 2021

Online platforms collect rich information about participants, and then share this information back with participants to improve market outcomes. In this paper we study the following information disclosure problem of a two-sided market: how much…

Economists routinely make functional form assumptions about consumer demand to obtain welfare estimates — often for convenience, tractability, or both. How sensitive are welfare estimates to these assumptions? In this paper, we answer this…

We study whether and how creditors exercise their control rights to shape their borrowers’ executive compensation plans. Highly levered borrowers often face incentives to underinvest due to agency conflicts driven by differences in time horizon…

This paper theoretically and empirically analyzes the trade-offs between consumption versus norm conformity and choosing from a menu of default (pre-selected) options versus opting to compute a preferred non-menu choice. In the theoretical model…

Income differences across US cities are well documented, but little is known about the level of standard of living in each city — defined as the amount of market-based consumption that residents are able to afford. In this paper we provide…

Transparency of quality in the healthcare sector primarily aims to facilitate patients’ care decisions, however, it also provides useful information to competing healthcare providers. We study how competitors respond to increased transparency…

I incorporate computational constraints into decision theory in order to capture how cognitive limitations affect behavior. I impose an axiom of computational tractability that only rules out behaviors that are thought to be fundamentally hard. I…

We study the hierarchy of communities in real-world networks under a generic stochastic block model, in which the connection probabilities are structured in a binary tree. Under such model, a standard recursive bi-partitioning algorithm is…

In this article we first summarize the specific plans articulated by seven major corporations for reducing their Corporate Carbon Footprints (abbreviated as CCF from hereon). Our sample is not intended to be representative of the broader…

We estimate a measure of segregation, experienced isolation, that captures individuals’ exposure to diverse others in the places they visit over the course of their days. Using Global Positioning System (GPS) data collected from smartphones, we…

I propose a new approach to mechanism design: rather than assume a common prior belief, assume access to a common dataset. I restrict attention to incomplete information games where a designer commits to a policy and a single agent responds. I…

This paper studies corporate venture capital (CVC) units of large US corporations to learn how they make decisions across several areas: internal organization of CVC units, relationships with parent companies, CVC unit objectives, investment…

Whom do individuals blame for intergroup conflict? Do people attribute responsibility for intergroup conflict to the in-group or the out-group? Theoretically integrating the literatures on intergroup relations, moral psychology, and judgment and…

This paper reviews the empirical methods used in the accounting literature to draw causal inferences. Similar to other social science disciplines, recent years have seen a burgeoning growth in the use of methods that seek to provide as-if random…

We study actual bidding behavior when a new auction format gets introduced into the marketplace. More specifically, we investigate this question using a novel data set on internet display ad auctions that exploits a staggered adoption by…

The availability of behavioral data on customers and advances in machine learning methods have enabled scoring and targeting of customers in a variety of domains, including pricing, advertising, recommendation and personal selling. Typically,…

I study the first modern global banking crisis that began in London in 1866 and provide causal evidence that financial sector disruptions can reshape international trade patterns for decades. Using newly collected archival loan records that link…

We find that financial reporting spurs consumer behavior. Using granular GPS data, we find that foot-traffic to firms’ commerce locations significantly increases in the days following their earnings announcements. Foot-traffic increases more for…