Expository articles

For a while, every now and then I used to write short expository articles for the magazine Artha, published by the Indian Institute of Management (Calcutta). These were intended for a broad audience (with some exposure to economics) on topics that interested me.


    • The Rise of the Passive Brigade [link] Magazine Issue: Sep 2017

(For financial markets to function well, prices must reflect fundamental information. Yet, it is precisely when markets are functioning well that incentives to gather information completely disappear!)

    • What do Trading Algorithms Know? [link] Magazine Issue: Nov 2017

(How might market algorithms handle paradoxical situations: a case for more epistemology in finance!)

    • The Magic of Blockchain [link] Magazine Issue: Jan 2018

(Blockchain, the underlying scaffolding of bitcoins, is as much about solving age-old economic problems as about new technology)

    • Who Do We Blame? [link] Magazine Issue: Mar 2018

(If the algorithms running the market are black-boxes -- as they increasingly are -- how do we apportion blame when something goes wrong?)

    • Great Expectations [link] Magazine Issue: May 2018

(The fundamental importance of expectations in price-formation, and how we try to reason about prices despite not fully understanding expectation-formation in human beings)

    • Competition, Computation and Regulation [link] Magazine Issue: Jul 2018

(Big data and massive computational power at the disposal of firms seem to be changing the basic nature of market regulation -- which traditionally has been mostly about maintaining competition)

    • When a Computer Scientist Wins a Computer Science Award for Research in Economics [link] Magazine Issue: Sep 2018

(The importance for economics of the game theoretic computational hardness results which won MIT’s Constantinos Daskalakis the Nevanlinna Prize, the highest award for young computer scientists)

    • Rational Expectations and the Design of a Central Bank [link] Magazine Issue: Nov 2018

(What does economic theory say about balancing the independence versus democratic accountability of a Central Bank?)

    • Trading the No-Trade Theorems [link] Magazine Issue: Jan 2019

(How modern finance theory arises from paradoxes, especially the No-Trade Theorem)

    • Impossibilities in Collective Choice [link] Magazine Issue: Mar 2019

(Various Impossibilities in Voting and Collective Choice Theory -- like Arrow's famous impossibility result -- and likely links to market paradoxes)

    • Beauty Contests [link] Magazine Issue: May 2019

(The importance of Keynesian beauty contests in a wide range of contexts, from banking to financial markets)

    • Economic Allegory [link] Magazine Issue: July 2019

(Do we really need specialists to helm economic policy making?)

    • Portfolios Beyond Finance [link] Magazine Issue: Sep 2019

(The advantages and dangers of applying the precepts of Portfolio theory outside of Finance)

    • Designing Mechanisms for Policy [link] Magazine Issue: Nov 2019

(Why we need the theory of Mechanism Design to inform applied policy making)