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I
will attend the ASSA meeting in Atlanta
and the RES Ph.D. Presentation
Meeting in London, where I will be available for a personal talk.
Job Market Papers:
“Signaling
in Matching Markets”, with Peter
Coles and Muriel Niederle
(2009) (Job Market Paper) (slides)
We
evaluate the effect of costless preference signaling in two-sided matching
markets between firms and workers. We consider a game of incomplete
information with firm segments. Workers agree on the ranking of firms
across "segments," but have idiosyncratic (and uniformly
distributed) preferences within segments. Firm preferences over workers are
idiosyncratic (and uniformly distributed). Each worker can send limited
number of signals to firms. Then, each firm makes an offer to a worker.
Finally, workers choose an offer from those available to them. We show
that, on average, introducing a signaling mechanism increases both the
expected number of matches as well as the expected welfare of workers for
this environment. The welfare of firms, on the other hand, changes
ambiguously. In addition, the signaling mechanism adds the most value for
markets wherein the number of firms and the number of workers are of
roughly the same magnitude. Furthermore, the optimal number of
signals―the number of signals that maximizes the expected increase in
the number of matches―increases when workers have more positions to
fill. Finally, additional periods of interaction between firms and workers
decrease the impact of signaling.
“Harmful
Signaling in Matching Markets” (2009) (Job Market Paper) (slides)
A
signaling mechanism has been proposed as a device to improve agent welfare
in decentralized two-sided matching markets. An example of such an
environment is the job market for new Ph.D. economists. We study a market
game of incomplete information between firms and workers. Workers have
almost aligned preferences over firms: each worker has "typical"
commonly known preferences with probability close to one and
"atypical" idiosyncratic preferences with the complementary
probability close to zero. Firms have some commonly known preferences over
workers. We show that the
introduction of a signaling mechanism is harmful for this environment.
Though signals transmit previously unavailable information, they also
facilitate information asymmetry that leads to coordination failures. As a
result, the introduction of a signaling mechanism lessens the expected
total number of matches.
Work in progress:
“Centralized Matching
Markets With Interdependent Values,” with Utku Unver
We
consider the problem of optimal object allocation in a one-sided matching
market without transfers. We examine a model having many agents and many
objects with interdependent values. Each agent receives noisy signals about
object values. These signals would, if known to other agents, affect the
values those other agents assign to the objects. This environment requires
optimal mechanisms to aggregate information and to induce truthful
revelation of preferences. We show the general impossibility of an incentive-compatible
and Pareto-optimal mechanism in this environment. Moreover, we propose a
mechanism that is undominated among all incentive-compatible mechanisms.
“Private
Value Contests,” with Lev Lokutsievskiy
We
consider an object allocation problem via contests in the environment of
private values. Several buyers, whose valuations are independently
identically distributed, compete for one object. All buyers bid
simultaneously. Each buyer can get the object with some probability. This
probability equals the ratio of that buyer’s bid to the sum of all buyers’
bids. We consider two settings: one in which buyers always pay their bid
and the other in which buyers pay only upon receiving the object. We
establish the existence and characterize the properties of symmetric
equilibria in both environments. We
also derive an explicit solution for a certain class of agent value
distributions.
Other research contributions:
“Solutions Manual
for Vijay Krishna’s ‘Auction Theory’ Book (2nd ed.),” with Jun Xiao
(2009)
“Orphans
and Children Deprived From Parental Care,” with
Igor Fedukin and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, CEFIR working papers (2007) (in
Russian, available upon request)
“Collective
Action Problem in Revolutions,” Best Student Papers NES (2006)
(available upon request)
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