I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Harvard University working on economic theory and behavioral & experimental economics.
I received my PhD from Stanford University in 2025. My CV is here.
You can contact me at lnagel@fas.harvard.edu.
Conditionally accepted for publication at Econometrica. [Extended abstract at EC'23]
We propose a measure of strategic complexity for strategy-proof mechanisms in terms of the contingent reasoning they require agents to engage in to recognize their dominant strategy. Our rankings are consistent with the coarser ones implied by the solution concepts of (strong) obvious strategy-proofness (Li, 2017b; Pycia and Troyan, 2023b). The added flexibility of our approach allows a designer to balance a mechanism’s simplicity with other objectives: We characterize the Ausubel (2004) auction as the simplest way to implement the VCG outcome in multi-unit allocation problems with transfers, and provide novel rankings of mechanisms that implement stable outcomes in matching problems.
We show agents can adopt a simplifying heuristic to avoid dominated strategies. It prescribes playing strategies optimal against all unconditional behaviors of the others. A mechanism is as-if dominant strategy if the adoption of this heuristic is self supporting. That is, no agent can ever profit by unilaterally strategizing further. As-if dominance is more permissive than dominance, allowing for substantially more transparent mechanisms. This is useful, as we show transparency makes the heuristic’s prescriptions easier to follow. Our approach rationalizes the auction choice of prominent online platforms, such as eBay. Further, it provides a unified explanation for a range of experimental findings. Finally, under some conditions met in our applications, as-if dominance ensures that coarse rationality emerges from a generational learning process.
Decomposing the Winner's Curse (with Muriel Niederle and Emanuel Vespa)
Revise & Resubmit at the American Economic Review.
One of the most prominent and most studied results in the common value auctions literature is the winner’s curse: The fact that in auctions where each bidder has noisy information about the shared value of the object, the bidder who wins the auction often incurs a loss. There is a vast literature documenting its ubiquity and robustness. While experiments have been very successful in proving that individuals, even when experienced and sophisticated, fall prey to the winner’s curse, it is largely an open question why individuals do so. Given the lack of empirical evidence on mechanisms, behavioral economists have provided a variety of theories. In this paper, we aim to provide the missing evidence on mechanisms. Namely, how important is each of the behavioral deviations from Nash equilibrium, how much do they contribute, and perhaps are there large parts that still need a new model? This type of experimental evidence can help refine behavioral theory and is crucial if we want to understand which tools will help individuals navigate economic situations and potentially help them make better decisions.
We study exploding offers by considering the strategic interaction between a low-tier firm and a set of workers within a large job market. Each worker has a private value for the firm and may receive offers from preferred top-tier firms according to an exogenous stochastic process. We show that workers receive exploding offers whenever their probability of receiving a top-tier offer is relatively small with respect to their risk aversion, and that there is a level of risk aversion beyond which a worker only receives offers that expire as soon as possible---independently of what all other firms are doing. In markets in which exploding offers are prevalent and workers' and the firm's preferences satisfy a weak form of positive correlation, workers' expected welfare is maximized if and only if exploding offers are banned. Furthermore, any minimal offer length that does not ban exploding offers may lead to workers falling through the cracks. All results are robust to a range of sequentially-rational strategies for the workers. Our predictions match existing evidence and have implications for policies regulating exploding offers.
Harvard University
Instructor, ECON 2049 Topics in Mechanism and Market Design (PhD-level)
Spring 2025-2026
Stanford University
TA for ECON 136 Market Design (undergraduate-level)
Spring 2022-2023
TA for ECON 102A Introduction to Statistical Methods (Postcalculus) for Social Scientists (undergraduate-level)
Fall 2022-2023, Winter 2022-2023
Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Germany
TA for Statistics I & II (undergraduate-level)
Winter 2016-2017, Summer 2016-2017