Working papers
This paper studies how firms manage a dynamic supplier portfolio to improve contracting outcomes. Using administrative data from a large Indian firm, I analyze a policy that rewards high-performing suppliers with membership in higher tiers, which come with the promise of more future business. I estimate a structural dynamic principal-agent model to quantify the policy's value and separate its dual functions: it retains better suppliers by sorting them based on persistent type, and it mitigates moral hazard by using relational value and induced competition to incentivize effort. A novel two-stage estimation first recovers the buyer's policy using an iterative algorithm to handle unobserved supplier tiers, then estimates supplier behavior conditional on this policy. The policy improves performance by 12% over random allocation, with selection effects dominating incentive effects (63% vs. 37%). The economic value of its relational approach is significant—achieving the same performance improvement in a spot-market benchmark would require 22% higher payments to suppliers. Counterfactual analysis shows that a policy optimized for the estimated environment could improve performance by 28%, but the firm's strategy is more robust, outperforming this policy when facing a less capable supplier pool.
Supply chain resilience via partial integration
How do firms adapt to ensure supply chain resilience? The typical answer, vertical integration, is limited in practice by its high costs and inflexibility. This paper introduces partial integration, defined as targeted buyer interventions across firm boundaries, as an effective alternative. Using novel daily timeline data from Indian manufacturing supply chains, we show that supplier underinvestment in key inputs, stemming from working capital constraints and noncontractibilities in input use, is the primary driver of supply chain disruptions. To overcome these issues, buyers exert control over supplier processes—through in-person monitoring, contingent contracts, and direct sourcing of raw materials—rather than merely advancing cash. This buyer involvement escalates as disruption risk increases: an unanticipated input cost shock leads to direct buyer control of inputs for the most constrained suppliers. We develop a three-stage model that rationalizes these strategies. The model clarifies that buyers control input decisions to prevent resource diversion due to noncontractibility, while allowing suppliers to retain control of production in order to preserve output market incentives. It also predicts that relational buyers with low monitoring and sourcing costs enjoy a comparative advantage in fostering resilient trade with poor regions.
(with Vishan Nigam)
Interest caps, competition, and strategic borrowing: Evidence from Kenya
We study Kenya’s 2016 interest-rate regulation, which capped bank lending but left one digital platform, called M-Shwari, exempt on the lending side while imposing a deposit-rate floor across all lenders. Using borrower-level administrative data, survey data and an RD around the implementation date, we show that lending on the exempt platform rose, with safer borrowers substituting toward cheaper capped credit and riskier borrowers increasing savings to rebuild limits. We build and estimate a simple model of screening and credit limit-setting to interpret these reallocations and compute welfare. The observed carve-out for M-Shwari preserves access for high-risk borrowers but yields a modest aggregate welfare decline relative to pre-policy; a uniform cap counterfactual generates substantially larger losses by eliminating credit for low-score borrowers.
(with Tavneet Suri and Prashant Bharadwaj)
Publications
Risk preferences of learning algorithms
Many economic decision-makers today rely on learning algorithms for important decisions. This paper shows that a widely used learning algorithm—ε-Greedy—exhibits emergent risk aversion, favoring actions with lower payoff variance. When presented with actions of the same expectated payoff, under a wide range of conditions, ε-Greedy chooses the lower-variance action with probability approaching one. This emergent preference can have wide-ranging consequences, from inequity to homogenization, and holds transiently even when the higher-variance action has a strictly higher expected payoff. We discuss two methods to restore risk neutrality. The first method reweights data as a function of how likely an action is chosen. The second method employs optimistic payoff estimates for actions that have not been taken often.
(with Andreas Haupt)
Games and Economic Behavior (2024) | Link
Ex-post implementation with interdependent values
We characterize ex-post implementable allocation rules for single object auctions under quasi-linear preferences with convex interdependent value functions. We show that requiring ex-post implementability is equivalent to requiring that the allocation rule must satisfy a condition that we call eventual monotonicity (EM), which is a weakening of monotonicity, a familiar condition used to characterize dominant strategy implementation.
(with Saurav Goyal)
Games and Economic Behavior (2023) | Link
Single peaked domains with designer uncertainty
This paper studies single-peaked domains where the designer is uncertain about the underlying alignment according to which the domain is single-peaked. The underlying alignment is common knowledge amongst agents, but preferences are private knowledge. Thus, the state of the world has both a public and private element, with the designer uninformed of both. I first posit a relevant solution concept called implementation in mixed information equilibria, which requires Nash implementation in the public information and dominant strategy implementation in the private information given the public information. I then identify necessary and sufficient conditions for social rules to be implementable. The characterization is used to identify unanimous and anonymous implementable social rules for various belief structures of the designer, which basically boils down to picking the right rules from the large class of median rules identified by Moulin (1980), and hence this result can be seen as identifying which median rules are robust to designer uncertainty.
Social Choice and Welfare (2023) | Link
Coverage analysis in millimeter wave cellular networks with reflections
The coverage probability of a user in a mmwave system depends on the availability of line-of- sight paths or reflected paths from any base station. Many prior works modelled blockages using random shape theory and analyzed the SIR distribution with and without interference. While it is intuitive that the reflected paths do not significantly contribute to the coverage (because of longer path lengths), there are no works which provide a model and study the coverage with reflections. In this paper, we model and analyze the impact of reflectors using stochastic geometry. We observe that the reflectors have very little impact on the coverage probability.
IEEE Global Communications Conference (2017) | Link
Works in progress
Disaggregating organizations: The effect of CEOs on firm markups
Standard models assume markups are set by firms as unified entities, abstracting from the role of individual executives. Do individual CEOs systematically set different markups, or are markups determined solely by firm-level optimization and market conditions? To answer this question, we estimate a Two-Way Fixed Effects (TWFE) model of firm markups on CEO and firm dummies. We use the De Loecker et al. (2020) framework to estimate firm-year level markups, and use CEO movements between firms to identify CEO effects on markups. After applying state-of-the-art procedures to correct bias and account for multiplicity of connected sets in TWFE estimates, we estimate that CEO effects explain 10-15% of the overall variance in markups.
(with Kartik Vira)
Competition and information sharing
This project studies the role of information sharing in an undifferentiated goods industry where an intermediary charges its members a fee for the collection, aggregation, and dissemination of their detailed production data to each other. We make two main contributions. First, we show that volatility in the market can force firms in a competitive market to subscribe to the intermediary. Once there is enough subscription to the intermediary, a self-sustaining collusive equilibrium can form. Thus, large demand shocks can cause a shift from a competitive market to a collusive regime in the presence of an intermediary, even in the absence of explicit agreements. Second, we device empirical tests to separately identify conduct and information sharing, along with an application to the poultry industry.
(with Lia Petrose)