Kiara Jihyun Kim - Research

Buyer-Initiated Auctions: Nominations in Oil & Gas | [pdf], [IIOC 2026 Slides]

Auctions receiving zero bids are not uncommon when sellers face uncertain demand over large inventory. While standard mechanisms like reserve prices or entry fees help extract revenue from interested bidders, they fail to solve the extensive margin problem of which items to offer, leading to costly failed auctions. Pre-auction nomination, where potential buyers pay a small fee to propose what should be auctioned, is a popular solution in the mineral rights market, but is not well studied. This paper shows that nomination serves dual purposes: demand screening for sellers and quality screening for buyers, while creating incentives for bidders to free-ride on tracts others have identified as valuable instead of exploring and nominating themselves. Using a two-stage game with Poisson arrivals, I characterize equilibrium exploration and nomination decisions and structurally estimate exploration costs using data from North Dakota oil and gas auctions (2017--2018). Counterfactual analysis reveals that raising the nomination threshold beyond the current single-nomination level produces a coordination failure: no firms nominate and no auctions are triggered. Varying the nomination fee reveals higher fees increase conditional bid quality through a selection effect while leaving auction trigger rates nearly unchanged. Comparing a nomination fee with a reserve price, both screen bidder quality but at different stages but with different outcomes: reserve price generates higher auction trigger rate but lower expected profit per triggered auction.

AI and the Labor Market: A Worker's-Eye View | [SSRN], [Media Coverage]
with Nathan Mester and Greg Sun

We collect and analyze data from a survey of just under 2,000 U.S. citizens to study perceptions about the role of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the workplace, as well as changes in career-relevant decision-making since the initial launch of ChatGPT. We report three main findings. First, most respondents report dedicating more time to learning now compared to before ChatGPT, and this trend is driven by those who use AI and believe that it is a useful tool for learning. Second, while time invested in learning tends to decrease with age, this trend is attenuated among those who believe in AI's potential as a learning tool. Third, workers who believe that AI is a complement to their own effort increase their effort in response to the introduction of AI while workers who believe that AI is a substitute show no such effect. These patterns are robust to the inclusion of a rich set of controls and demonstrate the importance of worker-level tradeoffs in shaping heterogeneous responses to the introduction of AI. They highlight career-long learning as a particularly important dimension of AI capabilities that is especially important in the eyes of many workers. Media Exposure

Identification of Interdependent Cost Using Dynamic Incentives with Application to Auction Bundling

This paper uses a dynamic structural model to characterize and quantify cost interdependency in mineral rights using sequential auction data to exploit dynamic spatial incentives arising from sequentially realized winning outcomes. I find that bidders overbid in anticipation of future rent from winning close-by auctions. Structural estimates indicate that winning multiple nearby tracts results in cost synergy, with variation in proximity and size. Using the results, I show that bundling auctions improves both efficiency and revenue in a sequential auction setting. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that revenue and efficiency improve if tracts 0.25 miles apart are bundled. Furthermore, the size of a bundle should be capped at 400 acres in total.

Market Responds the Morning After: How Abortion Regulation Changes and Age-Limit-Reduction of Emergency Contraceptive Pills Affected Market of the Morning-After Pills | [SSRN]
with Cecilia S. Diaz-Campo

The 2012-2016 time period is when there were changes to both the supply and demand side of the over-the-counter (OTC) Emergency Contraceptive Pills (ECP) market. The supply side shock has to do with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granting ECP the right to be sold in any retail store shelves, first to the branded version of ECP and eventually to the generic variants. This meant more stores can now sell ECP and thus better accessibility of ECP from the consumers’ perspective. The demand side shock is the 2013 Texas House Bill 2 Act that caused number of abortion facilities operating in Texas to decrease by half. Using simple Regression Discontinuity analysis and Triple Difference in Differences analysis on price of Emergency Contraceptive, I find suggestive evidence of 1. dynamic responses within retail chains to demand and supply shocks in terms of pricing and selection of products and 2. worse accessibility of ECPs for low income families.