理论经济学

With vast databases at their disposal, private tech companies can compete with public statistical agencies to provide population statistics. However, private companies face different incentives to provide high-quality statistics and to…

This paper offers a comprehensive treatment of the question as to whether a binary relation can be consistent (transitive) without being decisive (complete), or decisive without being consistent, or simultaneously inconsistent or…

We study dynamic matching in exchange markets with easy- and hard-to-match agents. A greedy policy, which attempts to match agents upon arrival, ignores the positive externality that waiting agents generate by facilitating future matchings.…

We offer a rationalization of the weak generalized axiom of revealed preference (WGARP) for both finite and infinite data sets of consumer choice. We call it maximin rationalization, in which each pairwise choice is associated with a…

I study optimal disclosure policies in sequential contests. A contest designer chooses at which periods to publicly disclose the efforts of previous contestants. I provide results for a wide range of possible objectives for the contest…

Consider an application sold on an on-line platform, with the app paying a commission fee and, henceforth, offered for sale on the platform. The ability to sell the application depends on its customer ranking. Therefore, developers may have…

Timing decisions are common: when to file your taxes, finish a referee report, or complete a task at work. We ask whether time preferences can be inferred when \textsl{only} task completion is observed. To answer this question, we analyze…

Following the work of Lloyd Shapley on the Shapley value, and tangentially the work of Guillermo Owen, we offer an alternative non-probabilistic formulation of part of the work of Robert J. Weber in his 1978 paper "Probabilistic values for…

In the pool of people seeking partners, a uniformly greater preference for abstinence increases the prevalence of infection and worsens everyone's welfare. In contrast, prevention and treatment reduce prevalence and improve payoffs. The…

In this paper, we show that the presence of the Archimedean and the mixture-continuity properties of a binary relation, both empirically non-falsifiable in principle, foreclose the possibility of consistency (transitivity) without…

Central to the official "green growth" discourse is the conjecture that absolute decoupling can be achieved with certain market instruments. This paper evaluates this claim focusing on the role of technology, while changes in GDP…

We demonstrate how a static optimal income taxation problem can be analyzed using dynamical methods. Specifically, we show that the taxation problem is intimately connected to the heat equation. Our first result is a new property of the…

In this paper, we study efficiency in truthful auctions via a social network, where a seller can only spread the information of an auction to the buyers through the buyers' network. In single-item auctions, we show that no mechanism is…

Consumers in many markets are uncertain about firms' qualities and costs, so buy based on both the price and the quality inferred from it. Optimal pricing depends on consumer heterogeneity only when firms with higher quality have higher…

Observational learning often involves congestion: an agent gets lower payoff from an action when more predecessors have taken that action. This preference to act differently from previous agents may paradoxically increase all but one…

We consider the interim core of normal form cooperative games and exchange economies with incomplete information based on the partition model. We develop a solution concept that we can situate roughly between Wilson's coarse core and…

We study the core of normal form games with a continuum of players and without side payments. We consider the weak-core concept, which is an approximation of the core, introduced by Weber, Shapley and Shubik. For payoffs depending on the…

The broad concept of an individual's welfare is actually a cluster of related specific concepts that bear a "family resemblance" to one another. One might care about how a policy will affect people both in terms of their subjective…

The potential benefits of portfolio diversification have been known to investors for a long time. Markowitz (1952) suggested the seminal approach for optimizing the portfolio problem based on finding the weights as budget shares that…

I propose a cheap-talk model in which the sender can use private messages and only cares about persuading a subset of her audience. For example, a candidate only needs to persuade a majority of the electorate in order to win an election. I…