Related papers: Tuition too high? Blame competition
How do incentive levels affect strategic behaviour? We address this with an experiment that separately identifies own- and opponent-incentive effects in two dominance-solvable games that differ in strategic complexity. Higher own incentives…
We propose a simple model to explore an educational phenomenon where the correct answer emerges from group discussion. We construct our model based on several plausible assumptions: (i) We tend to follow peers' opinions. However, if a…
We study a game theoretic model of standardized testing for college admissions. Students are of two types; High and Low. There is a college that would like to admit the High type students. Students take a potentially costly standardized…
There is growing concern about tacit collusion using algorithmic pricing, and regulators need tools to help detect the possibility of such collusion. This paper studies how to design a hypothesis testing framework in order to decide whether…
Ranking is fundamental to many areas, such as search engine optimization, human feedback for language models, as well as peer grading. Crowdsourcing, which is often used for these tasks, requires proper incentivization to ensure accurate…
Paid crowdsourcing platforms suffer from low-quality work and unfair rejections, but paradoxically, most workers and requesters have high reputation scores. These inflated scores, which make high-quality work and workers difficult to find,…
The sorting and filtering capabilities offered by modern e-commerce platforms significantly impact customers' purchase decisions, as well as the resulting prices set by competing sellers on these platforms. Motivated by this practical…
Exploiting others is beneficial individually but it could also be detrimental globally. The reverse is also true: a higher cooperation level may change the environment in a way that is beneficial for all competitors. To explore the possible…
In school choice, students make decisions based on their expectations of particular schools' suitability, and the decision to gather information about schools is influenced by the acceptance odds determined by the mechanism in place. We…
The cognitive research on reputation has shown several interesting properties that can improve both the quality of services and the security in distributed electronic environments. In this paper, the impact of reputation on decision-making…
We examine the effects of memory and different updating paradigms in a game-theoretic model of competitive learning, where agents are influenced in their choice of strategy by both the choices made by, and the consequent success rates of,…
Recommender systems have become increasingly important with the rise of the web as a medium for electronic and business transactions. One of the key drivers of this technology is the ease with which users can provide feedback about their…
We present empirical evidence on the relationship between demand shocks and price changes, conditional on returns to scale. We find that in industries with decreasing returns to scale, demand increases (which raise costs) correspond to…
As the number of scientific journals has multiplied, journal rankings have become increasingly important for scientific decisions. From submissions and subscriptions to grants and hirings, researchers, policy makers, and funding agencies…
Pressured by globalization and the increasing demand for public organisations to be accountable, efficient and transparent, university rankings have become an important tool for assessing the quality of higher education institutions. It is…
A fundamental decision faced by a firm hiring employees - and a familiar one to anyone who has dealt with the academic job market, for example - is deciding what caliber of candidates to pursue. Should the firm try to increase its…
Discussions of the economics of scholarly communication are usually devoted to Open Access, rising journal prices, publisher profits, and boycotts. That ignores what seems a much more important development in this market. Publishers,…
This paper examines how the observability of demand shocks influences pricing patterns and market outcomes when firms delegate pricing decisions to Q-learning algorithms. Simulations show that demand observability induces Q-learning agents…
We modify the standard model of price competition with horizontally differentiated products, imperfect information, and search frictions by allowing consumers to flexibly acquire information about a product's match value during their…
We analyze reputation dynamics in an online market for illicit drugs using a novel dataset of prices and ratings. The market is a black market, and so contracts cannot be enforced. We study the role that reputation plays in alleviating…