Ariel Pakes could certainly also win the prize for being loved by his students and colleagues:
CONFERENCE IN HONOR OF ARIEL PAKES
I'll post market design related news and items about repugnant markets.See also my Game theory, experimental economics, and market design page. I have a general-interest book on market design: Who Gets What--and Why The subtitle is "The new economics of matchmaking and market design."
Ariel Pakes could certainly also win the prize for being loved by his students and colleagues:
CONFERENCE IN HONOR OF ARIEL PAKES
A computer scientist whose work I follow has won an award that reflects on both his teachers and students.
Aaron Roth receives 2023 CyLab Distinguished Alumni Award
"Aaron Roth, the Henry Salvatori Professor of Computer Science and Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania, has been named CyLab's 2023 Distinguished Alumni Award winner.
...
"Roth earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2010, where he was advised by former CMU Professor Avrim Blum. His dissertation, 'New Algorithms for Preserving Differential Privacy,' gave new methods for performing computations on private data.
"Nominated by his former advisee, now Assistant Professor in CMU's School of Computer Science, Steven Wu, the award recognizes Roth's excellence in algorithms and machine learning, leadership in the field, and commitment to his students.
"As my advisor, Aaron is nothing less than a beacon of inspiration, marked by his relentless curiosity, exceptional instinct for identifying the most exciting questions, creative problem-solving acumen, and impeccable eloquence in communication," said Wu.
"Advising is one of the best parts of my job," said Roth. "Being recognized by one of my former students at the University where I earned my Ph.D. is really special."
Scott Cunningham, an economist who devotes a lot of his efforts to providing public goods, recently had a post on the phrase "paying it forward." He writes that he connected it with a movie with a similar name, but has recently come to view it differently (for reasons I find too embarrassing to quote, but related to the fact that I use the phrase now and then.)
Wikipedia says "Pay it forward is an expression for describing the beneficiary of a good deed repaying the kindness to others instead of to the original benefactor." It goes on to say "Robert Heinlein's 1951 novel Between Planets helped popularize the phrase." I could have first seen it there, as I read much of Heinlein's science fiction when I was a boy.
My associations with the phrase now mostly come from the motivations and actions of some living kidney donors, particularly in kidney exchange chains.
The phrase is certainly is evocative of what we do so much of in academia (when we're doing academia well): it describes the relationship between studying and teaching, and between teachers and students.
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Scott's post announced that, as part of paying things forward, he's funding a prize for young economists.
Here's a paper on the economics job market, and the influence of dissertation advisers.
Adviser Connectedness and Placement Outcomes in the Economics Job Market, by Michael E. Rose and Suraj Shekhar, forthcoming in Labour Economics
Abstract: We study the role of social networks in the academic job market for graduate students of Economics. We find that the connectedness of a student’s advisor in the coauthor network significantly improves her job market outcome. We use two identification strategies and find that a) higher Eigenvector centrality of an adviser leads to her student getting placed at a better ranked institution, and b) larger distance between an adviser and an institution decreases the probability that her students are placed there. Our study sheds light on the importance of social connections in a labour market where information frictions regarding job openings are virtually absent.
...
"Our setting, the academic job market for Economists, is special in that information frictions regarding job openings are (almost) absent due to Job Openings for Economists. Thus, our finding that social networks play a role in this market is likely because they help decrease the uncertainty about an applicant’s quality."
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I'm reminded of the timeless joke about how rabbits eat wolves: if you don't know it, there are many versions on the internet, here (and this one comes with a bonus joke: Rabbit's Ph.D. Thesis and Lion's Watch Repair Business).
Erling Skancke defended his dissertation last week:
Welfare and Strategic Externalities in Matching Markets with Interviews (Job Market Paper) Recent debate in the medical literature has raised concerns about the pre-match interview process for residency and fellowship positions at hospitals. However, little is known about the economics of this decentralized process. In this paper, I build a game-theoretic model in which hospitals conduct costly interviews in order to learn their preferences over doctors. I show that increased interview activity by any hospital imposes an unambiguous negative welfare externality on all other hospitals. In equilibrium, both hospitals and doctors may be better off by a coordinated reduction in interview activity. The strategic externality is more subtle, and conditions are derived under which the game exhibits either strategic complementarities or substitutes. Moreover, an increase in market size may exacerbate the inefficiencies of the interview process, preventing agents from reaping the thick market benefits that would arise in the absence of the costly interviews. This effect increases participants' incentives to match outside of the centralized clearinghouse as markets become thicker, jeopardizing the long-term viability of the clearinghouse. The model also provides new insights into several market design interventions that have recently been proposed. |
David Zuckerman defended his dissertation yesterday.
Here are the papers he defended:
Preferences for Compensatory and Retributive Justice
I experimentally investigate third-party preferences for victim compensation and offender punishment when one party has harmed another. I find that if the harm is intentional, third parties not only display an increased demand for punishment, but also an increased demand for compensation. I refer to these additional demands for punishment and compensation as the demand for retributive justice and compensatory justice, respectively. Demand for retributive justice is positively correlated with demand for compensatory justice. However, third parties do not treat the two types of justice as substitutes or complements. Moreover, I generally find that these types of justices do not take victim knowledge of offender punishment nor offender knowledge of victim compensation into account. I then extend my investigation to a risky setting, where the offender's action may or may not end up harming the victim. I find that for both compensation and punishment, not only does the intent behind the action matter, but the consequences of the action as well. However, this is primarily driven by third-party distributional preferences; the outcome does not seem to affect the demand for retributive or compensatory justice.
A Theory of Chosen Preferences
(with B. Douglas Bernheim, Luca Braghieri, and Alejandro Martínez) [Online Appendix] [2019 Working Paper Version]
American Economic Review, Vol. 111, No. 2 (February 2021), pages 720-754
We propose and develop a theory of preference formation based on the idea that people evaluate their lives according to worldviews that provide accounts of success and failure, and that they choose those worldviews subject to feasibility constraints. Our framework highlights the role of mindset ï¬,exibility, a trait that determines the relative weights the decision maker places on her current and anticipated worldviews when evaluating future outcomes. We show that our theory generates rich behavioral dynamics, thereby illuminating a wide range of applications and providing potential accounts for a variety of observed phenomena.
Unseen Preferences: Homophily in Friendship Networks
Revise and Resubmit, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
Homophily is typically measured using a single dimension to define groups. However, people generally display preferences over multiple dimensions. I develop a simple model that characterizes agents both by a (discrete) "type" and a (continuous) "personality" value. Agents have preferences-for-similarity over both dimensions, but homophily is only measured with respect to type. I identify sufficient conditions on preferences such that a strongly stable matching exists, and show via simulations that the friendship patterns generated by these matchings qualitatively line up with several patterns noted in the data. The matchings can be calculated via an algorithm where agents "search" through utility space for friends. Increasing costs to friendship cause both within-group and systematic across-group heterogeneity in the extent of students' search through utility space. Majority-group "outliers" - those who must search an extensive amount in utility space for friends - form a disproportionate number of cross-group friendships. These outliers are the key reason why mid-sized groups exhibit the highest levels of homophily bias, a distinctive feature noted in prior literature.
Mazel tov, David. Welcome to the club.
Süleyman Kerimov defended his dissertation yesterday, in Stanford's MS&E department. He studies matching, and will teach at Rice next year.
His main advisors are both named Itai.
These are the papers he spoke about:
If you persist, you find that 70 isn't nearly as old as you once imagined it to be (and as it used to be, maybe not even that long ago). Certainly three score years and ten is no longer an inspirationally long life.
(The Hebrew verse 10 of Psalm 90 simply says "70 years." I think that "three score and ten" is a flourish originally introduced in the King James translation.
יְמֵי-שְׁנוֹתֵינוּ בָהֶם שִׁבְעִים שָׁנָה
"The days of our years are threescore years and ten, or even by reason of strength fourscore years...")
Earlier this month I was surprised at what I thought would be only a Hanukkah party, by a pre-birthday celebration in which a number of my students located a pretty big group of my former students and postdocs to produce this video of birthday greetings and reminisces.
I've been lucky in my students and young colleagues, long ago and still today. Thanks to Alex and the local gang, to all those on the video, and to all those who weren't found by the surprise team, who are all remembered fondly and gratefully...
Alejandro Martínez-Marquina defended his dissertation this week.
The three papers he chose for his dissertation are these:
When a Town Wins the Lottery: Evidence from Spain
(with Christina Kent) [Slides] [Draft]
"How do local wealth shocks impact economic activity? For over two centuries, Spain has conducted a national lottery which often results in the random allocation of up to $800 million in cash to the citizens of one town. This is the only case in the world where individuals living in the same location randomly receive pure wealth shocks of this scale. Leveraging data on town-level lottery ticket expenditures, we compare winning towns to non-winning towns that had the same probability of winning. We find that although consumption increases, the lottery causes a slowdown in economic activity and deters new migration to towns that won in recent decades. However, an analysis of a century of lottery winners reveals large and persistent increases in population for towns that won in earlier periods."
(with Mike Shi)
"We propose that holding debt causes worse financial decisions using a novel experimental design where we randomly assign debt. Our design isolates the consequences of holding debt while controlling for potential confounding factors such as initial wealth levels, selection, risk, and time preferences. Our findings show that debt causes behavioral biases detrimental to subjects' financial payoffs. However, subjects' strategies are not random but instead debt-biased, consistent with an additional penalty for holding negative balances. We refer to the financial losses caused by debt as the Burden of Debt and provide evidence that, under certain circumstances, these behavioral biases can compound and lead to substantial losses. Furthermore, we show in additional treatments how these debt-biased behaviors can also deter subjects from borrowing and forego profitable opportunities."
Ingraining Traditional Gender Roles in the Classroom: Evidence from the Spanish Social Service
"This study uses a regression discontinuity framework to examine the long- run effects of conservative education on women's' family and labor decisions. In 1939, the Spanish dictatorship created the Social service, a compulsory 6- month training program aimed at relegating women to the roles of mothers and housewives. We exploit the discontinuity induced by the sudden abolition of the Social Service, in addition to variation in the age of enrollment, to examine the consequences of attending the program. Using historical enrollment records and the universe of birth certificates, we find the Social Service was successful in instilling the regime's ideology. Women exposed to the class get married and have kids at younger ages, consistent with the desire to form a family sooner. In addition, they are more likely to declare being housewives when their first child is born. Future work will explore the underlying mechanisms and the effects on children by surveying women who enrolled around abolition."
Welcome to the club, Alejandro.
Aleandro ( top center) with Chenzi Xu, Muriel Niederle, Doug Bernheim, Al Roth, Ran Abramitzky |
We're still locked out of the Economics building, but science progresses and dissertations are defended. I've been remiss in celebrating them: here are two recent ones.
Akhil Vohra, whose job market paper I blogged about here.
Akhil Vohra (top center) with Al Roth, Itai Ashlagi, Matt Jackson, Gabe Carroll and Fuhito Kojima |
And Mike Shi, one of whose papers is this one:
The Burden of Household Debt By ALEJANDRO MART´INEZ-MARQUINA and MIKE SHI *
Mike Shi (upper right) with Al Roth, Jeremy Bulow, Muriel Niederle, Luigi Pistaferri, and Nick Bloom |
Welcome to the club, Akhil and Mike.
Two days ago I received a note of encouragement by email from Övül Sezer, a former student in my Harvard class on experimental economics, which she spoke about while being celebrated by Poets and Quants.
BY: NATHAN ALLEN
Here's that Q&A from her interview:
"Professor I most admire and why:
"There have been so many professors who inspired me and influenced me in several ways and I am so grateful for all the things I learned from them. But one class that I took in college changed the course of my path. Back in college, I was studying math, spending a lot of time on equations and mathematical proofs. In a very serendipitous way, I ended up trying to take a graduate-level economics class, called “Experimental Economics” because I wanted to take a class where I didn’t have to do any weekly “problem set” but it still counted as credit. To be able to take the class as an undergrad, I needed the professor’s permission. The professor teaching the course happened to be Al Roth, who allowed me to the class and introduced me to the love of experiments. Through him, I started learning a lot about experiments, and how we can take our very own observations about life and test them. This was the first time I fell in love with experimental science, and this is where I am today. In addition to being a great professor, Al Roth is also a very thoughtful and a kind person. I feel tremendously grateful to have taken that class."