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The rate at which nodes in a network increase their connectivity depends on their fitness to compete for links. For example, in social networks some individuals acquire more social links than others, or on the www some webpages attract…
Do workers always work more for more? We investigate how intertemporal and uncompensated labor supply decisions change across observational and experimental windows, within the same workers. Combining a real-effort emoji-counting experiment…
A four-pronged approach to dealing with Social Science Phenomenon is outlined. This methodology is applied to Financial Services, Economic Growth and Well-Being. The four prongs are like the four directions for an army general looking for…
While popularity bias is recognized to play a crucial role in recommmender (and other ranking-based) systems, detailed analysis of its impact on collective user welfare has largely been lacking. We propose and theoretically analyze a…
We consider the problem of repeatedly choosing policies to maximize social welfare. Welfare is a weighted sum of private utility and public revenue. Earlier outcomes inform later policies. Utility is not observed, but indirectly inferred.…
Consumption practices are determined by a combination of economic, social, and cultural forces. We posit that lower economic constraints leave more room to diversify consumption along cultural and social aspects in the form of omnivorous or…
Information policies such as scores, ratings, and recommendations are increasingly shaping society's choices in high-stakes domains. We provide a framework to study the welfare implications of information policies on a population of…
Algorithmic rankers have a profound impact on our increasingly data-driven society. From leisurely activities like the movies that we watch, the restaurants that we patronize; to highly consequential decisions, like making educational and…
We present a model of competition between web search algorithms, and study the impact of such competition on user welfare. In our model, search providers compete for customers by strategically selecting which search results to display in…
There are clear benefits associated with a particular consumer choice for many current markets. For example, as we consider here, some products might carry environmental or `green' benefits. Some consumers might value these benefits while…
Our societies are heterogeneous in many dimensions such as census, education, religion, ethnic and cultural composition. The links between individuals - e.g. by friendship, marriage or collaboration - are not evenly distributed, but rather…
We study the welfare effects of overreaction to information in the form of diagnostic expectations in markets with asymmetric information, and the effect of a simple intervention in the form of a tax or a subsidy. A large enough level of…
This paper studies a decentralized many-to-one matching market where preferences remain uncertain during the matching process. Institutions initiate matching by sending offers, and applicants decide whether to accept upon receiving them.…
Aggregated phenomena in social sciences and economics are highly dependent on the way individuals interact. To help understanding the interplay between socio-economic activities and underlying social networks, this paper studies a…
We study the role of correlation in matching markets, where multiple decision-makers simultaneously face selection problems from the same pool of candidates. We propose a model in which a candidate's priority scores across different…
The nexus between debt and inequality has attracted considerable scholarly attention in the wake of the global financial crisis. One prominent candidate to explain the striking co-evolution of income inequality and private debt in this…
This paper investigates the value of recommendations for disseminating economic information, with a focus on frictions resulting from preference heterogeneity. We consider Bayesian expected-payoff maximizers who receive non-strategic…
The availability of big data recorded from massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) allows us to gain a deeper understanding of the potential connection between individuals' network positions and their economic outputs. We…
Algorithmic predictions are increasingly used to inform the allocations of goods and interventions in the public sphere. In these domains, predictions serve as a means to an end. They provide stakeholders with insights into likelihood of…
In an online social network, link recommendations are a way for users to discover relevant links to people they may know, thereby potentially increasing their engagement on the platform. However, the addition of links to a social network…