Related papers: Screening for breakthroughs
We propose an improvement of the famous IC3 algorithm for model checking safety properties of finite state systems. We collect models computed by the SAT-solver during the clause propagation phase of the algorithm and use them as witnesses…
The publication process both determines which research receives the most attention, and influences the supply of research through its impact on researchers' private incentives. We introduce a framework to study optimal publication decisions…
We study the mechanism design problem in the setting where agents are rewarded using information only. This problem is motivated by the increasing interest in secure multiparty computation techniques. More specifically, we consider the…
We study how to optimally design selection mechanisms, accounting for agents' investment incentives. A principal wishes to allocate a resource of homogeneous quality to a heterogeneous population of agents. The principal commits to a…
Progress in science and technology is punctuated by disruptive innovation and breakthroughs. Researchers have characterized these disruptions to explore the factors that spark such innovations and to assess their long-term trends. However,…
How can one efficiently share payoffs with collaborators when participating in risky research? First, I show that efficiency can be achieved by allocating payoffs asymmetrically between the researcher who makes a breakthrough ("winner") and…
This paper studies how uncertainty about problem difficulty shapes problem-solving strategies. I develop a dynamic model where an agent solves a problem by brainstorming approaches of unknown quality and allocating a fixed effort budget…
Many modern organisations employ methods which involve monitoring of employees' actions in order to encourage teamwork in the workplace. While monitoring promotes a transparent working environment, the effects of making monitoring itself…
This paper studies a preference evolution model in which a population of agents are matched to play a sequential prisoner's dilemma in an incomplete information environment. An institution can design an incentive-compatible screening…
This paper develops a model of \textit{identification design} and applies it to robust causal inference in microeconometrics. The decision maker observes the population distribution of signals generated by an information structure and ranks…
How to optimally persuade an agent who has a private type? When elicitation is feasible, this amounts to a fairly standard principal-agent-style mechanism design problem, where the persuader employs a mechanism to first elicit the agent's…
This paper studies a class of incentive schemes based on intervention, where there exists an intervention device that is able to monitor the actions of users and to take an action that affects the payoffs of users. We consider the case of…
This paper proposes a dynamic research contest, namely chasing contest, in which two asymmetric contestants exert costly effort to accomplish two breakthroughs. The contestants are asymmetric in that one of them is present-biased and has…
We study a statistical signal processing privacy problem, where an agent observes useful data $Y$ and wants to reveal the information to a user. Since the useful data is correlated with the private data $X$, the agent employs a privacy…
Breakthrough discoveries and inventions involve unexpected combinations of contents including problems, methods, and natural entities, and also diverse contexts such as journals, subfields, and conferences. Drawing on data from tens of…
Contemporary scientific research is a distributed, collaborative endeavor, carried out by teams of researchers, regulatory institutions, funding agencies, commercial partners, and scientific bodies, all interacting with each other and…
We study a continuous time contracting model in which a principal hires a risk averse agent to manage a project over a finite horizon and provides sequential payments whose timing is endogenously determined. The resulting nonzero-sum…
We study the optimal investment policy of a firm facing both technological and cash-flow uncertainty. At any point in time, the firm can decide to invest in a standalone technology or to wait for a technological breakthrough. Breakthroughs…
In the classical principal-agent hidden-action contract model, a principal delegates the execution of a costly task to an agent. In order to complete the task, the agent chooses an action from a set of actions, where each potential action…
Does a more transparent climate disclosure policy induce lower emissions? This paper examines the welfare implications of transparency in climate disclosure regulation. Increased disclosure transparency could result in a larger equilibrium…