Emil Temnyalov's page

EMIL TEMNYALOV
Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor)
Economics department, UTS Business School,University of Technology Sydney
emil.temnyalov [at] gmail
Google Scholar profile
Last updated: September 2023

ABOUT ME

I do research in industrial organization and market design. My main interests are in mechanism design, large matching and assignment games, information economics, and contests.

I am especially motivated by research questions with policy applications and significant social welfare consequences, such as for example in the fields of public policy (differential treatment, affirmative action, optimal rationing, inequality), innovation (R&D incentives and the organization of the patent system), antitrust policy and regulation.

I am currently working on new models of differential treatment and of inequality in market design. If you are interested in the application of mechanism and market design to education and labor markets and you share my passion for public policy-oriented theory, please send me an email! I am very happy to share my ideas and discuss collaborations.

CURRENT RESEARCH

College admissions with reputational externalities (with Isa Hafalir and Kentaro Tomoeda)
Admission priorities and socio-economic inequality
Mechanism design for differential treatment

WORKING PAPERS

Capacity design, organizational structure and differential treatment

PUBLICATIONS

Patent privateering, litigation, and R&D incentives (with Jorge Lemus),

The RAND Journal of Economics, November 2017. doi: 10.1111/1756-2171.12211

Points mechanisms and rewards programs,

Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Fall 2019. doi: 10.1111/jems.12292

Pay-for-delay with follow-on products (with Jorge Lemus),

Review of Industrial Organization, June 2020. doi: 10.1007/s11151-020-09750-6

Liability insurance: Equilibrium contracts under monopoly and competition (with Jorge Lemus and John Turner),

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2021. doi: 10.1257/mic.20180245

An information theory of efficient differential treatment,

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2023. doi: 10.1257/mic.20200400

Diversification and information in contests (with Jorge Lemus),

Economic Theory, November 2023. doi: 10.1007/s00199-023-01532-x

RECENT NEWS

In 2020-21 I was a member of the Mechanism Design for Social Good working group for Asia-Pacific. In 2021-22 I joined the Conversations with Practitioners working group. Since then I continue to be involved in the MD4SG working group on Inequality.

In November 2021 I founded the Australian Education Markets (AusEM) academic network, which brings together theoretical, empirical and experimental economists interested in market design and education policy. We organize an online seminar series and we also plan to host problem pitch sessions and conversations with policy-makers in 2022. If you are an Australian economist and are interested in education policy and/or market design, please reach out---we would be happy to have you!

P.S. Professional statement
Economics is a fantastic academic field. But as an academic profession, it is broken. Our publishing process is broken:

review times are shockingly long;
the reviews can lead to unreasonable interactions between researchers and referees, and create perverse incentives in the process of doing research;
our social norms continue to create a hostile professional climate and to reward cliquishness.

The responsibility for these problems lies with all of us, not only the senior academics and journal editors who have the ability to effect change directly. In this context I aim to do what I can in my own actions and decisions, and I encourage others to also think about what they can do individually:

I aim to finish every referee report in less than 1 month of it being assigned to me;
If the above is not feasible due to travel or work or personal constraints, I let the editor know and I excuse myself from the review process;
I aim to write reasonable and balanced referee reports, based entirely on the content of the research itself.

I believe our profession would improve dramatically if we adopted better norms and the whole review process consisted of a week of journal handling, a few weeks of referee review, and a week of editorial decision-making. Imagine if we consistently had our papers reviewed within a period of one or two months in total! Procrastination by referees and editors is one of the main reasons why reports currently take so much longer than this, without necessarily adding additional value to the review process. As an example, I once received a desk rejection from the AER, which took 1 month. The decision email was anonymous and contained no information, or any evaluation to demonstrate whether anyone had looked at the paper or how much they had done so in this 1 month period. I would be surprised if no one else finds such a status quo shocking. I would have much preferred a 1 day desk rejection, given that there was no content in the rejection.
The timing of reviews is only one part of the problem. I believe we as a profession must also think more critically about the role that referee reports serve in the publishing process. What is the appropriate role of a referee when writing a report: to confirm the validity of a paper's results, to provide subjective comments on their importance, to advise the authors on how they ought to write the paper? Some of these functions are necessary, or at least can be constructive, but they might also be taken to a wasteful extreme. Some food for thought on this topic: https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/jep.31.1.231

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