Research

Network externalities make platform entry difficult, since a new platform's appeal to one side of the market depends on participation from the other. One lever available to an entrant is exclusivity, compensating suppliers to commit exclusively, though this reduces the variety any single platform offers. We study this tradeoff in the sixth—generation home video game console industry—incumbents Sony (PlayStation 2) and Nintendo (GameCube), and entrant Microsoft (Xbox)—developing a dynamic structural model in which third-party developers jointly choose which platform bundle to release on and when to launch, letting us recover development costs, cost synergies, and exclusivity benefits separately by developer type. We find that Xbox paid a significant exclusivity premium over PlayStation 2 on average, but this premium is not uniform across developer type for either platform. Xbox paid large developers more, consistent with foreclosure, while PlayStation 2 paid small developers more, consistent with retention; a further reversal on Xbox, where small developers' benefit is larger relative to their own cost, points to a cost advantage small developers hold on the entrant that large developers do not. Counterfactual simulations show developers respond to losing an exclusivity incentive by diversifying across platforms only when no competing exclusive arrangement remains available; otherwise, they relocate to the rival platform's terms.

Link to paper

Presentations:

• International Industrial Organization Conference - Massachusetts, April 2026

• International Association of Applied Econometrics Annual Conference - Portugal, June 2026

Social norms shape economic behavior but are difficult to measure. I develop a scalable method that recovers social norms from standard census data as equilibrium beliefs in social interaction models. These beliefs capture prevailing expectations within reference groups and are identified under transparent equilibrium conditions. Applying the method to female labor force participation in Indonesia and Brazil, I recover norm belief indices at the regency and municipality level. In Java, a one-unit increase in the equilibrium norm raises individual participation by about nine percentage points. The measure predicts future female labor supply and educational investment, has no relationship with male labor supply, and generalizes to Brazil, validating its interpretation as a measure of social norms.

Link to paper

Presentations:

• International Association for Applied Econometrics Annual Conference - Italy, June 2025

• Midwest Econometric Group Conference - Illinois, October 2025 

• Society of Economic Measurement Conference - St. Louis, July 2026

We model strategic interaction between well owners and the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources (LDNR) as a simultaneous-move, incomplete-information game: owners choose whether to violate environmental regulations, while LDNR chooses which wells to inspect. Using data on all Louisiana fracking well pads, we estimate payoff parameters by nested fixed-point maximum likelihood for status-changing wells in FY 2023–2024. Violations are unprofitable on average, especially for larger operators, while monetary penalties play little role in compliance. Policy simulations show that lower inspection costs increase detection but not compliance, whereas meaningful penalties reduce both violations and inspections in equilibrium.

Link to paper

Presentations:

• International Industrial Organization Conference - Pennsylvania, May 2025

• International Association for Applied Econometrics Annual Conference - Italy, June 2025

• World Congress of Econometric Society - Korea, August 2025