Published and accepted peer-reviewed articles
(with Maciej H. Kotowski; Theoretical Economics, 2024, 19(4): 1619--1658)
This paper investigates the formation of production and trading networks in economies with general interdependencies and complex property rights. We argue that the right to exclude, a core tenet of property, grants asset owners local monopoly power that is amplified by an economy’s endogenous production network. Our analysis generalizes the exclusion core, a cooperative solution concept based on the right to exclude, to markets with production. We identify sufficient (and essentially necessary) conditions for the nonemptiness of the exclusion core. Multisourcing and a bias toward shorter supply chains emerge in exclusion-core outcomes. As a methodological contribution, we generalize the top trading cycles algorithm to a production economy and we show that it identifies outcomes in an economy’s exclusion core.
(Journal of Economic Theory, 2022, 203: 105472)
This paper generalizes the Probabilistic Serial (PS) mechanism of Bogomolnaia and Moulin (2001) to matching markets with arbitrary constraints. The constraints are modeled as a list of permissible ex-post allocations. The method described here computes simple linear inequalities such that when a general version of the PS algorithm is executed under these inequalities, the outcome is an sd-efficient lottery over the permissible set of allocations. The inequalities correspond to the hyperplanes defining a convex polytope that is intuitively constructed from the given constraint set. The method is general, can be applied to both one-sided and two-sided matching markets, and allows for multi-unit demand.
[supplementary material] (Mathematical Social Sciences, 2020, 104: 78--87)
I study kidney exchange with strict ordinal preferences and with constraints on the lengths of the exchange cycles. Efficient deterministic mechanisms have poor fairness properties in this environment. Instead, I propose an individually rational, ordinally efficient and anonymous random mechanism for two-way kidney exchange based on Bogomolnaia and Moulin's (2001) Probabilistic Serial mechanism. Individual rationality incentivizes patient-donor pairs who are compatible with each other to participate in the exchange, thus increasing the overall transplantation rate. Finally, individual rationality, ex-post efficiency and weak strategyproofness are incompatible for any mechanism.
(with Maciej H. Kotowski; Econometrica, 2019, 87(5): 1663--1692)
We propose a new solution for discrete exchange economies and resource-allocation problems, the exclusion core. The exclusion core rests upon a foundational idea in the legal understanding of property, the right to exclude others. By reinterpreting endowments as a distribution of exclusion rights, rather than as bundles of goods, our analysis extends to economies with qualified property rights, joint ownership, and social hierarchies. The exclusion core is characterized by a generalized top trading cycle algorithm in a large class of economies, including those featuring private, public, and mixed ownership. It is neither weaker nor stronger than the strong core.
(International Journal of Game Theory, 2019, 48(4): 1203--1240)
I study a strategic-communication game between an informed sender and an uninformed receiver with partially aligned preferences. The receiver is endowed with the ability to probabilistically detect if the sender is lying. Specifically, if the sender is making a false claim about her type, with some commonly known probability p the receiver additionally observes a private signal indicating that the sender is lying. The main result is that the receiver's stochastic lie-detection ability makes fully revealing equilibria---the best outcome for the receiver---possible, even for small p (less than 1/2). Additionally, if the language consists of precise messages, fully revealing equilibria exist only for p=1 and for a set of intermediate values of p that is bounded away from 0 and 1, making the maximal ex-ante expected equilibrium utility of the receiver non-monotone in p. If vague messages are allowed, full revelation can be supported for all large enough p, overturning the non-monotonicity and improving communication outcomes relative to the precise-language case.
(Social Choice and Welfare, 2016, 46(3): 511--520)
We consider two natural notions of strategyproofness in random object-assignment mechanisms based on ordinal preferences. The two notions are stronger than weak strategyproofness but weaker than strategyproofness. We demonstrate that the two notions are equivalent, provide a geometric characterization of the new intermediate property which we call convex strategyproofness, and then show that the (generalized) probabilistic serial mechanism is, in fact, convexly strategyproof. We finish by showing that the property of weak envy-freeness of the random serial dictatorship can be strengthened in an analogous manner.
Working papers
(with Jacob Coreno; revision requested at Journal of Economic Theory)
This paper considers the problem of allocating bundles of heterogeneous and indivisible objects to agents, when monetary transfers are not allowed and agents reveal only ordinal preferences over objects, e.g., allocating players' contract rights to teams in professional sporting leagues. Preferences over objects are extended to incomplete preferences over bundles using pairwise dominance. We provide a simple characterization of the class of draft rules: they are the only allocation rules satisfying efficiency, respectfulness of the priority, envy-freeness up to one object and resource-monotonicity. We also prove two impossibility theorems: (i) non-wastefulness, respectfulness of the priority and envy-freeness up to one object are incompatible with weak strategy-proofness; (ii) efficiency and envy-freeness up to one object are incompatible with weak strategy-proofness. If agents may declare some objects unacceptable, then draft rules are characterized by efficiency, respectfulness of the priority, envy-freeness up to one object, resource-monotonicity together with a mild invariance property called truncation-invariance.
(with Jared Gars, Mateusz Stalinski, and Emilia Tjernström; previously circulated as "Media and Motivation: The Effect of Performance Pay on Writers and Content")
Digital platforms increasingly compensate content creators based on engagement metrics, yet the effects of these incentives remain poorly understood. We conducted a field experiment with a Kenyan news outlet to study how high-intensity performance incentives affect content production, quality, and journalist well-being in digital media. We randomly assigned writers to either pay-per-click (PPC) or piece-rate contracts. The PPC contract tripled per-article pageviews and increased daily pageviews by 107%, but reduced the number of published articles by 74%. While PPC writers earned more per article, their overall earnings fell, lowering the firm’s wage bill and increasing profits. However, these gains came at a cost: PPC writers shifted content production away from local news and towards attention-grabbing political stories. PPC writers also used less positive language in both headlines and article bodies. Our results show that engagement-based pay boosts reader traffic but caution that this may come at the cost of compromised coverage diversity, local news provision, and journalist well-being.
Other publications
(with Maciej H. Kotowski; ACM SIGecom Exchanges, 2021, 19(1): 30--44)
We discuss the exclusion core, a solution concept for object-allocation and object-exchange problems. The exclusion core is based on the right of exclusion and is especially useful for the analysis of economies with complicated property arrangements, such as those with shared ownership. The exclusion core coincides with the (strong) core in classic settings, and is closely related to the celebrated Top Trading Cycles algorithm.