Welcome

What I Do

I am an economist specializing in mechanism design. A broad theme that underlies my research is aggregation and design. Many problems in economics can be formulated as ones in which individuals have different characteristics and our objective is to aggregate them and reach a collective decision of some kind. The characteristics can be preferences that an individual has about private consumptions or social alternatives, a level of demand that an individual requires of some good, or any piece of information, private or public, that would help guide the collective decision. Social institutions can be viewed as an aggregation mechanism that solicits from various parties those characteristics relevant to solving an allocation problem at hand. I am interested in the design of well-behaved mechanisms in such environments. The criteria for good mechanisms vary from context to context but usual desiderata require that they should be efficient, fair, and non-manipulable by strategic behavior.

My research up to this point has attempted to address the following issues: 

• Allocating private goods in exchange economies 

• Distributing public resources such as school seats and housing units  

• Using lotteries as a means of resource allocation

• Determining individuals' membership to groups based on opinions

• Exploring implications and equivalence of different notions of efficiency, fairness, and stability

• Designing mechanisms that are robust to strategic manipulation

To get a better sense of what I study, please refer to a tag cloud below generated by the introductions of my papers. It presents ideas and concepts that are key to my work.

Thanks for visiting.