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- 2021
- Working Paper
Shared Models in Networks, Organizations, and Groups
By: Joshua Schwartzstein and Adi Sunderam
Why did the market rise yesterday? What are the implications of the latest school shooting? Why did a particular employee get promoted? To answer such questions, we often exchange models, stories, narratives, and interpretations with others. This paper provides a...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Treatment and Selection Effects of Formal Workplace Mentorship Programs
By: Jason Sandvik, Richard Saouma, Nathan Seegert and Christopher Stanton
While formal mentorship programs are ubiquitous, less is known about who gains from receiving mentorship. In this paper, we report the outcome of a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) carried out in a US-based inbound sales call center where one branch of the experiment...
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- July 2021
- Article
Redistribution through Markets
By: Piotr Dworczak, Scott Duke Kominers and Mohammad Akbarpour
Policymakers frequently use price regulations as a response to inequality in the markets they control. In this paper, we examine the optimal structure of such policies from the perspective of mechanism design. We study a buyer-seller market in which agents have private...
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- June 2021
- Article
Making Marketplaces Safe: Dominant Individual Rationality and Applications to Market Design
By: Benjamin N. Roth and Ran I. Shorrer
Often market designers cannot force agents to join a marketplace rather than using pre-existing institutions. We propose a new desideratum for marketplace design that guarantees the safety of participation: Dominant Individual Rationality (DIR). A marketplace is DIR if...
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- May–June 2021
- Article
Savvy Self-Promotion: The Delicate Art and Science of Bragging
By: Leslie K. John
Everyone knows that success at work depends on being—and being seen as—both competent and likable. You need people to notice your growth and accomplishments while also enjoying your company. But if you draw attention to the value you’ve created, to ensure that managers...
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- March 2021
- Case
Chime Solutions
Just two years after launching their 10k by 2020 initiative to hire 10,000 employees by 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced Chief Executive Officer Mark Wilson to send nearly all of his staff at Chime Solutions (Chime) to work from home. Chime was a customer contact...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Institutional Corporate Bond Demand
By: Ishita Sen, Lorenzo Bretscher, Lukas Schmid and Varun Sharma
We compile a rich dataset that links institutional investors' position level holdings with corporate bond characteristics and estimate demand elasticities with respect to critical sources of risk. Persistence in institutions' holdings provide us with an instrument to...
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- November 2020
- Article
Taxation in Matching Markets
By: Arnaud Dupuy, Alfred Galichon, Sonia Jaffe and Scott Duke Kominers
We analyze the effects of taxation in two-sided matching markets, i.e., markets in which all agents have heterogeneous preferences over potential partners. In matching markets, taxes can generate inefficiency on the allocative margin by changing who is matched to whom,...
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- October 2020
- Article
Comparative Statics for Size-Dependent Discounts in Matching Markets
By: David Delacretaz, Scott Duke Kominers and Alexandru Nichifor
We prove a natural comparative static for many-to-many matching markets in which agents’ choice functions exhibit size-dependent discounts: reducing the extent to which some agent discounts additional partners leads to improved outcomes for the agents on the other side...
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- September 2020
- Article
The Rise of the Investor State: State Capital in the Chinese Economy
By: Meg Rithmire and Hao Chen
The nature and extent of the role of the Chinese state in the economy is fundamental to many empirical and theoretical debates about that country’s political economy. We document and explain the rise of a novel form of intervention on the part of the Chinese state: the...
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- Article
Cultural Diversity on Wall Street: Evidence from Consensus Earnings Forecasts
By: Joseph Pacelli, Kenneth Merkley and Roni Michaely
We examine how cultural differences among agents influence the aggregate outcome of a common forecasting task. Using both exogenous shocks to sell-side analyst diversity and panel regression methods, we find that increases in analyst cultural diversity positively...
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- August 2020
- Article
Lone Wolves in Competitive Equilibria
By: Ravi Jagadeesan, Scott Duke Kominers and Ross Rheingans-Yoo
This paper develops a class of equilibrium-independent predictions of competitive equilibrium with indivisibilities. Specifically, we prove an analogue of the “Lone Wolf Theorem” of classical matching theory, showing that when utility is perfectly transferable, any...
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- Article
Active World Model Learning with Progress Curiosity
By: Kuno Kim, Megumi Sano, Julian De Freitas, Nick Haber and Daniel Yamins
World models are self-supervised predictive models of how the world evolves. Humans learn world models by curiously exploring their environment, in the process acquiring compact abstractions of high bandwidth sensory inputs, the ability to plan across long temporal...
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- March 6, 2020
- Article
Networking Doesn't Have to Be Self-Serving
How can individual leaders help to tackle big social problems? It can seem like an overwhelming, impossible task. But successful change agents have shown that networking and communication skills are key. They show up, in person, to investigate the issues and build...
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- March 2020
- Article
Which Early Withdrawal Penalty Attracts the Most Deposits to a Commitment Savings Account?
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, Christopher Harris, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian and Jung Sakong
Previous research has shown that some people voluntarily use commitment contracts that restrict their own choice sets. We study how people divide money between two accounts: a liquid account that permits unrestricted withdrawals and a commitment account that is...
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- 2020
- Article
Towards Modeling the Variability of Human Attention
By: Kuno Kim, Megumi Sano, Julian De Freitas, Daniel Yamins and Nick Haber
Children exhibit extraordinary exploratory behaviors hypothesized to contribute to the
building of models of their world. Harnessing this capacity in artificial systems promises
not only more flexible technology but also cognitive models of the...
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- 2019
- Chapter
Agent Pricing in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from Airbnb
By: Jun Li, Antonio Moreno and Dennis Zhang
- November 2019
- Article
Full Substitutability
By: John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers, Alexandru Nichifor, Michael Ostrovsky and Alexander Westkamp
Various forms of substitutability are essential for establishing the existence of equilibria and other useful properties in diverse settings such as matching, auctions, and exchange economies with indivisible goods. We extend earlier models’ definitions of...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Collusion in Brokered Markets
By: John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers and Richard Lowery
The U.S. residential real estate agency market presents a puzzle for economic theory: commissions on real estate transactions have remained high for decades even though entry is frequent and costs are low. We model the real estate agency market, and other brokered...
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- June 2019
- Exercise
Worldwide Studios: Confidential Instructions—Sam Star's Agent
By: Ken Basin and Guhan Subramanian