Related papers: Crisis of Public Utility Deregulation and the Unre…
This paper presents a model of network formation and public goods provision in local communities. Here, networks can sustain public good provision by spreading information about people's behaviour. I find a critical threshold in network…
This study explores Telehealth Parity Laws (TPLs) and their heterogeneous treatment effects by policy type on outpatient utilization and Medicare costs, considering broadband and licensure infrastructure. State-specific legislative framings…
In electricity markets, customers are increasingly constrained by their budgets. A budget constraint for a user is an upper bound on the price multiplied by the quantity. However, since prices are determined by the market equilibrium, the…
This paper revisits the classic instrument choice problem in a setting with consumption externalities, through the lens of robust mechanism design. A regulator can implement any incentive-compatible policy but is uncertain about how…
Privacy has traditionally been a major motivation for decentralized problem solving. However, even though several metrics have been proposed to quantify it, none of them is easily integrated with common solvers. Constraint programming is a…
Congestion is a common failure mode of markets, where consumers compete inefficiently on the same subset of goods (e.g., chasing the same small set of properties on a vacation rental platform). The typical economic story is that prices…
This study constructs a novel analytical general equilibrium model to compare environmental policies in a setting where oligopolistic energy firms engage in third-degree price discrimination across residential consumers and industrial…
The discussions around the unsustainability of the dominant socio-economic structures have yet to produce solutions to address the escalating problems we face as a species. Such discussions, this paper argues, are hindered by the limited…
Time-varying electricity pricing better reflects the varying cost of electricity compared to flat-rate pricing. Variations between peak and off-peak costs are increasing due to weather variation, renewable intermittency, and increasing…
We study price regulation for a monopolist operating in networked markets with demand spillovers. Achieving efficiency requires price reductions proportional to consumers' Katz-Bonacich centralities, which generally cannot be implemented by…
In asserting a competitive market environment as a justification for regulatory forbearance, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 finally articulated a clear standard for the FCC's public interest standard, one of the most protean concepts in…
Everyone wants clean air, peace and other public goods but is tempted to freeride on others' efforts. The usual way out of this dilemma is to impose norms, maintain reputations and incentivize individuals to contribute. In situations of…
From social networks to supply chains, more and more aspects of how humans, firms and organizations interact is mediated by artificial learning agents. As the influence of machine learning systems grows, it is paramount that we study how to…
Central to privacy concerns is that firms may use consumer data to price discriminate. A common policy response is that consumers should be given control over which firms access their data and how. Since firms learn about a consumer's…
The increasing penetration of renewable generations, along with the deregulation and marketization of power industry, promotes the transformation of power market operation paradigms. The optimal bidding strategy and dispatching methodology…
It has proved to be difficult to translate the lessons from the literature on universal service into the policy framework because of political interests and regulatory capture. Neither the USA or Europe has made a very good job of devising…
We study how governments promote social welfare through the design of contracting environments. We model the regulation of contracting as default delegation: the government chooses a delegation set of contract terms it is willing to…
Privacy has traditionally been a major motivation for distributed problem solving. Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problem (DisCSP) as well as Distributed Constraint Optimization Problem (DCOP) are fundamental models used to solve…
Welfare economics relies on access to agents' utility functions: we revisit classical questions in welfare economics, assuming access to data on agents' past choices instead of their utilities. Our main result considers the existence of…
How should we think of the preferences of citizens? Whereas self-optimal policy is relatively straightforward to produce, socially optimal policy often requires a more detailed examination. In this paper, we identify an issue that has…