Research

Publications

A Position Assignment Experiment Among Active Duty U.S. Navy Physicians (Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design, December 2025) with Richard Childers, Alicea Mingo, Joel Schofer, and William Howard Beasley

Market design is the great modern success of microeconomic theory: the classic example is the use of deferred acceptance to assign new medical school graduates to residencies. In other settings where deferred acceptance is not the standard, participant attitudes towards and perceptions of it may present an impediment to its practical use. We conducted two surveys and a deferred acceptance experiment to investigate the appetite among United States Navy physicians for the use of deferred acceptance in assigning them to their next tours of duty. Our results suggest that people may have more favorable attitudes towards the use of deferred acceptance following practical experience with it.

Information-Based Discrimination (accepted at Mathematical Social Sciences; most recent draft 11/15/2024)

I show in a stylized model of college admissions that information asymmetries between a principal (college) and agents (high schools) are sufficient to generate discrimination, i.e., different treatment of otherwise identically qualified individuals. This effect is distinct from taste-based and statistical discrimination. Information-based discrimination is total welfare improving but does not Pareto dominate a plausible alternative admissions mechanism.

Implementation of Assortative Matching Under Incomplete Information, (Journal of Economic Theory, March 2020)

My first publication ever, and my job market paper, so I love it forever. I construct a Vickrey-Clarke-Groves-like mechanism which implements assortative matching as an ex-post Nash equilibrium. This mechanism (1) unifies N-sided matching markets under a single mechanism design framework and (2) generalizes Edelman, Ostrovsky and Schwarz's local envy freeness result in the generalized second price auction to an incomplete information environment.

Information Hold Up and Intermediaries (Games, September 2022)

I show that a well-connected intermediary (such as talent agents who represents multiple performers to a buyer) can improve outcomes for those whom they represent not because they represent superior performers relative to other intermediaries but because the buyer can learn more about all performers by providing favorable treatment to one intermediary. 

Working Papers

When Does A Centralized Market Dominate Search? (most recent draft 4/26/2022)

Work in Progress

Equilibrium in Second-Price Auctions with Endogenous Borrowing Constraints (with Ashwin Kambhampati and Peter Yamasaki)

Service Assignment at the US Naval Academy (with Ashwin Kambhampati and Chad Redmer)

Matching With Endogenous Firm Creation

Matching with Interdependent Preferences (with Skyler Mason)

Cutting in Line: The Effect of Budget Constraints on College Admissions

A Median Voter Theorem With Unacceptable Candidates