Job Market Paper
Algorithmic Collusion Under Firm-Specific Cost Shocks (Revise & Resubmit, The Journal of Industrial Economics)
The increasing use of algorithms to make pricing decisions has begun to concern antitrust authorities. I analyze the behavior of Q-learning algorithms in a repeated differentiated product Bertrand pricing game where firm-specific marginal cost fluctuates over time. I find that the algorithms autonomously learn to tacitly collude, sustaining high prices through reward-punishment strategies under both privately and publicly observable cost fluctuations. Supra-competitive outcomes remain achievable under incomplete information. The findings are robust to changes in demand and learning parameterization, as well as initial beliefs of the reinforcement learning algorithm.
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Working Papers
The Live Nation and Ticketmaster Saga: A Robust Merger Analysis (with Michael Noel, Ayush Jha, and Ali Jaffri) (Under Review)
We examine the impact of the controversial Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger on concert ticket prices using regression discontinuity, non-parametric, and structural break analyses. Results indicate statistically and economically significant price increases across all tiers immediately following the 2010 merger, persisting thereafter. Maximum, minimum, and average ticket prices rose by 80%, 23%, and 57%, respectively, confirmed robustly by non-parametric and structural break tests. The findings have immediate policy implications for this merger and industry, highlighting the need for heightened regulatory scrutiny, especially in vertical mergers involving dominant firms in concentrated markets. Additionally, results advocate for routine empirical retrospectives post-merger to evaluate competitive impacts. These retrospectives not only assess past merger outcomes but also refine regulatory expectations and enhance enforcement precision for future merger evaluations.
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Health Profiles and Promotional Engagement in the U.S. Vitamins and Supplements Market (with Ziqi Hang and Li Zeng) (Under Review)
We examine how household health heterogeneity relates to product choice, promotional engagement, and out-of-pocket prices in the U.S. vitamins and dietary supplements market. We link more than 181,000 NielsenIQ Consumer Panel transactions from 2022 to a household health survey and construct orthogonal indices of health burden and health proactivity using principal component analysis. After product, retailer, and month fixed effects are included, both indices are positively associated with deal use and with coupon redemption, though the coupon-redemption association is statistically weaker for proactivity. More proactive households purchase higher-priced supplement segments, but once product composition is absorbed, the continuous-index pre-coupon associations are economically small and statistically insignificant. A one-standard deviation increase in proactivity is associated with an effective price roughly 0.3%—or four cents—lower. An exact accounting decomposition shows that the separately recorded coupon component accounts arithmetically for about 63% of this gradient. For health burden, the decomposition reveals a significantly larger recorded coupon reduction relative to the pre-coupon price but no detectable net effective-price difference. Health profiles are therefore more clearly associated with promotional engagement than with economically large same-product price differences.
Overcoming Misaligned Incentives: Evidence from the NBA Heave Rule (with James Kemper) (Under Review)
Performance metrics can misalign individual and organizational incentives. We study a clean case: an NBA player holding the ball as a quarter expires must choose between a low-probability "heave" that can only help his team and protecting his shooting statistics. We model this decision as a metric-driven principal-agent problem and test it using play-by-play data from 2015-16 through 2025-26, exploiting the 2025-26 Heave Rule, which removed the individual statistical penalty for end-of-quarter heaves. Before the reform, players heaved on 58 percent of opportunities; reluctance was concentrated among efficient shooters and players in contract years, as the model predicts. After the reform, the heave rate jumped to 94 percent, the efficiency gradient collapsed, and difference-indifferences estimates using the untreated fourth quarter confirm the effect is sharp, immediate, and smallest among the players with the least efficiency to protect. Removing a metric distortion realigned individual behavior with team objectives almost completely.
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Select Works in Progress
Algorithmic Pricing Under Alternative Learning Specifications