VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Essays in mechanism design
Keywords: Economics.

This thesis consists of three papers in mechanism design. Chapter 1 is based on a paper of mine entitled "Quality Disclosure and Price Discrimination". Chapter 2 is based on "Penalty, Voting, and Collusion: a Common Agency Approach to Industrial Regulation and Political Power". Chapter 3 is based on "Partitional Information Revelation under Renegotiation". A key framework in mechanism design is screening: a principal who designs the contract induces agents with private information to select certain action(s) or bundle(s). Classical results are second-best distortion and Myerson ironing, which are derived when the agency involves a single task (or tasks independent across agents), an agent's information is privately known by himself, and there is full commitment. Chapter 1 considers incentivizing tasks that are related through a resource constraint. It studies the second-degree price discrimination when the supply quality follows some exogenous distribution, or more specifically, the design of information and pricing in a monopolistic market with product quality dispersion. The main message is that optimality requires a partial disclosure, and finer results on the allocation distortion depend on the heterogeneity of the buyers' preference. When such preference over assignment, i.e., quality distribution, has a uni-dimensional sufficient statistics in the quality space, the optimal distortion resembles Myerson's ironing and the optimal disclosure takes a partitional form. For more general preference, the optimal distortion departs from Myerson's result. Chapter 2 considers eliciting signals informative of the agent's private information from multiple sources. An interesting case is by considering a voting committee as the principal, where voting aggregates welfare-relevant information but faces corruptive incentives. The key insights are that the optimal rule is a binary verdict, resembling the principle of maximum deterrence, and the corruptive incentives typically push the optimal voting rule towards unanimity. Chapter 3 considers commitment with renegotiation: the counterparties can stick to the previously signed long-term contract or revise it with mutual consent. More specifically, it studies a long-term relationship between a seller and a buyer whose valuation (for a per-period service or a rental good) is private. In such a dynamic game, a new dimension of mechanism design, namely intertemporal type separation, arises as its induced belief-updating affects the rent extraction--efficiency tradeoff. The main message is that all PBE share the following property in the progressive screening process: at each history, the seller partitions the posterior support into countable intervals and offers a pooling contract to each of these intervals
Essays in microeconomics
Keywords: Business.

Even for established firms, it is a jungle out there. Technologies become obsolete, consumers' tastes change, and new rivals await in every corner, hoping to take their position. How established firms cope with such a changing environment is the theme of my dissertation, Essays in Microeconomics. The dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter treats change as inexorable and studies how incentive conflicts within the organization affect their ability to deal with it. The second and third chapters, in turn, study whether established firms can slow change (instead of dealing with it) by trying to prevent the entry of new, more efficient rivals
Essays in microeconomics
Keywords: Wilson, Robert, 1937- degree committee member.
Business.

This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first two chapters study the economic dynamics of agents that are trying to reach a mutually beneficial agreement or transaction. Chapter 1 considers a bilateral negotiation in the presence of an external party who also cares about the outcome of the negotiation. Chapter 2, in turn, considers a problem in which a seller designs a mechanism to a sell an object to buyers for maximal revenue. Chapter 3 provides a methodological contribution to the theory of stochastic orders
Essays in perishable inventory management
Keywords: Business.

This dissertation considers a retailer that sells a perishable product over an infinite time horizon whose quality deteriorates over time. The retailer jointly decides whether to issue the oldest (First-In-First-Out or FIFO) or newest (Last-In-First-Out or LIFO) stock first to consumers and when to remove unsold items from shelf to maximize the objective which is a linear combination of the long-run average profits and customer welfare. We show that contrary to the industry norm that issuing items according to the FIFO issuance while keeping inventory as long as possible is optimal, using the LIFO issuance and pulling inventory from shelf early can be optimal if the product is highly perishable and the salvage value is sufficiently large. We also find when customers are heterogeneous in their utility per quality, the retailer may prefer to provide information about the age of individual items to customers to exploit customers' heterogeneity. We base our analysis on the notion of rational expectations equilibrium in which customers and the retailer make optimal decisions based on their rational expectations regarding product quality and customers' shopping behaviors
Essays in political economics
Keywords: Business.

This thesis explores the external validity of existing findings on three important questions in political economics. In the first chapter, I explore whether partisans show the same willingness to engage in discriminatory behavior in natural settings as they do in laboratory experiments and surveys. In the second chapter, I leverage a unique change in the US federal tax code to determine whether legislator compensation has a detectable impact on political competition. In the third chapter, I analytically and empirically examine the interpretation of a commonly used research design for studying the importance of politician background characteristics. In each case, I extend our understanding of these problems by probing the scope of prior research
Essays in political economy
Keywords: Business.

In this dissertation, I study how political institutions and information shape voters' and politicians' behavior in developing countries. In particular, my dissertation aims to understand how these factors impact entry, selection and political accountability, with special attention on the implications that these hold for development outcomes. Methodologically, I use economic theory to derive clear empirical predictions and subsequently, using quasi-experimental and structural estimation methods, test the implications of the theory. In the first chapter, I investigate how local media in Brazil impact the behavior of politicians and voters by improving voters' information environment. The second chapter of my dissertation shows that money plays a critical role in determining who enters politics. Finally, the third chapter of my dissertation studies the impact of political institutions on accountability
Essays in public economics
Keywords: Economics.

My dissertation is comprised of three chapters that largely focus on two broad themes: labor supply decisions and the provision of various forms of insurance, including unemployment insurance and health insurance. Many key public policies that seek to provide social safety nets and provide insurance coverage may influence individual labor supply choices. Correspondingly, new labor market opportunities may also alter how individuals interact with social programs and economic policies. In Chapter 1, I explore the implications of the recent growth in gig employment opportunities (e.g. Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit, etc.) for individuals facing unemployment shocks. In Chapter 2, I quantify the implications of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) insurance expansions for three key stakeholders -- providers, patients, and taxpayers. In Chapter 3, I examine implications of the ACA on individuals' labor market outcomes
Essays in public economics and advanced applied econometrics
Keywords: Economics.

This dissertation explores various research questions in public economics and advanced applied econometrics. The three chapters of the dissertation analyze how to ensure access to high quality and well-coordinated health and elder care for the vulnerable populations in the U.S., and evaluate hospital care quality as measured by impact of health shocks on labor market outcomes in Denmark. In this process, I develop advanced applied econometric methods by integrating cutting-edge big data and machine learning tools with rigorous empirical economic analysis
Essays in robust mechanism and contract design
Keywords: Business.

In this thesis, we propose solutions to three problems in the area of robust mechanism design. The first two problems concern revenue maximization by a seller facing several potential buyers whose knowledge of the probability distribution of buyers' valuations is scarce. The third problem concerns contracting under unknown production technology. More specifically: In Chapter 2 (first substantive chapter), we consider the following model. An indivisible object may be sold to one of n agents who know their valuations of the object. The seller would like to use a revenue-maximizing mechanism but her knowledge of the values' distribution is limited: she knows only the means (which may be different) an upper bound for valuations. Valuations may be correlated. Using a constructive approach based on duality, we prove that a mechanism that maximizes the worst-case expected revenue among all deterministic dominant-strategy incentive compatible, ex post individually rational mechanisms takes the following form: (1) the bidders submit bids; (2) for each bidder, a bidder-specific linear function of the bid is calculated (we call it a ``linear score''); (3) the object is awarded to the agent with the highest score, provided it's nonnegative; (4) the winning bidder pays the minimal amount he would need to bid to still win in the auction. The set of optimal mechanisms includes other mechanisms but all those have to be close to the optimal linear score auction in a certain sense. When means are high, all optimal mechanisms share the linearity property. Second-price auction without a reserve is an optimal mechanism when the number of symmetric bidders is sufficiently high. In Chapter 3, we consider a related problem in which the valuations are constrained to be independent draws from a partially known distribution. The seller knows one or two moments of the distribution. We ask what would be a reserve-price in a second-price auction that maximizes worst-case expected revenue. Using a technique different from Chapter 2, we prove that it is always optimal to set the reserve price to seller's own valuation. However, the maxmin reserve price may not be unique. If the number of bidders is sufficiently high, all prices below the seller's valuation, including zero, are also optimal. In the final chapter, we seek a robust solution of a hidden-action, rather than a hidden-information problem. A principal is uncertain about a technology mapping an agent's effort to the distribution of output. The agent is risk neutral and there is a participation constraint but no limited liability constraint. Transfers can be costly. An example of this setting is the case where the principal is a society trying to properly incentivize a firm to carry out innovation. We first show that when the principal employs minimax-regret criterion in the face of the technological uncertainty, an optimal contract is affine. We then characterize the full set of optimal contracts. A contract is optimal if and only if it lies within certain affine, increasing bounds that collapse to a point when output reaches its maximum value
Essays in the economics of artificial intelligence
Keywords: Economics.

This dissertation consists of three chapters. In the first chapter, I develop a new method to predict the impacts of any technology on occupations. I use the overlap between the text of job task descriptions and the text of patents to construct a measure of the exposure of tasks to automation. I first apply the method to historical cases such as software and industrial robots. I establish that occupations I measure as highly exposed to previous automation technologies saw declines in employment and wages over the relevant periods. I use the fitted parameters from the case studies to predict the impacts of artificial intelligence. I find that, in contrast to software and robots, AI is directed at high-skilled tasks. Under the assumption that historical patterns of long-run substitution will continue, I estimate that AI will reduce 90:10 wage inequality, but will not affect the top 1%. The second chapter presents work coauthored with Nick Short, Nick Bloom, and Josh Lerner. We show that patenting in software, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence has grown rapidly in recent years. Such patents are acquired primarily by large US technology firms such as IBM, Microsoft, Google, and HP, as well as by Japanese multinationals such as Sony, Canon, and Fujitsu. Chinese patenting in the US is small but growing rapidly, and world-leading for drone technology. Patenting in machine learning has seen exponential growth since 2010, although patenting in neural networks saw a strong burst of activity in the 1990s that has only recently been surpassed. In all technological fields, the number of patents per inventor has declined near-monotonically, except for large increases in inventor productivity in software and semiconductors in the late 1990s. In most high-tech fields, Japan is the only country outside the US with significant US patenting activity; however, whereas Japan played an important role in the burst of neural network patenting in the 1990s, it has not been involved in the current acceleration. Comparing the periods 1970-89 and 2000-15, patenting in the current period has been primarily by entrant assignees, with the exception of neural networks. The third chapter presents work coauthored with Nick Bloom, Chad Jones, and John Van Reenen. Long-run growth in many models is the product of two terms: the effective number of researchers and their research productivity. We present evidence from various industries, products, and firms showing that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply. A good example is Moore's Law. The number of researchers required today to achieve the famous doubling of computer chip density is more than 18 times larger than the number required in the early 1970s. More generally, everywhere we look we find that ideas --- and the exponential growth they imply --- are getting harder to find
Essays on American politics and the science of science
Keywords: Political Science.

The essays in this dissertation, despite spanning different substantive topics, collectively speak to the importance of null findings to the scientific enterprise. The first paper quantifies publication bias in the social sciences by analyzing a population of studies known to have been conducted and performing a full accounting of which were published, where, and why. We provide not only direct evidence of publication bias, but also identify the stage of research production at which publication bias occurs — authors do not write up and submit null findings. The second paper examines whether descriptive representation affects trust in different levels of government, finding no relationship between representation by Latino elected officials and trust among their Latino or White constituents in Texas. Although no evidence of an effect is not the same as evidence of no effect, the null finding from this study suggests potential directions for future research on the conditions under minority representational gains may affect political trust. Finally, the third paper documents another remarkable null effect — Presidents regularly make use of the presidential ``bully pulpit" to directly speak to the public on a range of issues, yet using a wide array of new data and an interrupted time series design we show these appeals have little to no effect on public opinion and a small, short-lived effect on news coverage and social media. Our findings challenge several important theories and introduce a new puzzle: why do presidents make public addresses when they have a limited effect?
Essays on artificial intelligence in personalized markets
Keywords: Management Science and Engineering.

Personalized markets have become ubiquitous in recent years. Matching platforms such as Uber or Airbnb, social networks like Facebook and Twitter, online marketplaces such as Amazon, all provide individualized experiences to different users based on their unique characteristics and preferences. Analyzing these markets in depth requires a multidisciplinary approach. In particular, it requires a closer relation between Economic Theory and Artificial Intelligence. In this work I'll present two examples that interlink both disciplines in order to analyze these markets. Chapter 1 presents a novel algorithm which we call PBDM that personalizes the BDM mechanism, introduced by Becker, DeGroot, and Marschack. The BDM mechanism has been recently used as a treatment assignment mechanism in order to estimate the treatment effects of policy interventions while simultaneously measuring the demand for the intervention. In this work, we develop a personalized extension of the classic BDM mechanism using modern machine learning algorithms to predict an individual's willingness to pay. This lowers the cost for experimenters, provides better balance over covariates that are correlated with both the outcome and willingness to pay, and eliminates biases induced by ad-hoc boundaries in the classic BDM algorithm. Chapter 2 covers an exercise to estimate the economic value of data in algorithms with an application to ride-sharing. We present a novel approach to estimating an upper bound for the economic value of data due to its role in algorithms. Our method does not assume that users have failed to internalize any costs in data production (such as privacy), and show that the price of data is in great part determined by the power dynamics present in markets. We apply our method to ride-sharing by simulating a market using data from a large ride-sharing platform (Uber). We estimate that in our scenario, with users having full market power, data would contribute up to 47% of Uber's revenue. This would translate to average payments to drivers of up to approximately 0 per day, solely as compensation for the value of the data they generate as drivers, which corresponds to 20 to 40 percent of a average driver's daily earnings. Most of the increase would be absorbed by Uber. However, depending on the conditions of the ride-sharing market, these payments could be passed on to riders through rate increases
Essays on instrumental variables
Keywords: Economics.

This paper concerns inference on the coefficient of a single endogenous variable in the instrumental variables model when some knowledge of the first stage sign is known to the researcher. To study the properties of tests in the IV model that have correct size under weak instruments, current literature often focus on tests that are invariant to orthogonal transformations of the instruments. In the homoskedastic case, the conditional likelihood ratio (CLR) test is considered "near optimal" because, in most cases, the power of the CLR test is shown to be close to that of the two-sided power envelope for this class of invariant tests. We present novel size-correct tests that presume knowledge of the sign of the first-stage coefficients, and are not invariant. We find that when the sign of the first-stage sign is known, one of these tests numerically dominates both CLR and the two-sided invariant power envelope in terms of asymptotic power. To demonstrate the ubiquity of first-stage sign knowledge in empirical work, we survey papers published in the American Economic Review 2014-2018 that use instrumental variables and find that over 80% presume knowledge of the first-stage sign. These findings suggest a larger class of tests that researchers may consider, both in studying the optimality of tests, and in empirical research
Essays on the antecedents and consequences of attitudinal advocacy
Keywords: Business.

People are more divided, and less open to opposing views, than they have been in years. For example, Democrats and Republicans are further apart ideologically than at any point in the past two decades (Pew Research Center 2017). People rarely engage with individuals from across the divide (Eagly, Kulesa, Chen, and Chaiken 2001); even when they do, it often does not lead to meaningful change. In my research, I am interested in how to bridge this divide by better understanding how people change their own minds and aim to change the minds of others. Specifically, I aim to understand advocacy and attitude change from a values perspective: How can we leverage individuals' important values in order to encourage attitude change and advocacy? Under what circumstances do these values lead to unintended consequences? A primary motivation for holding and expressing attitudes is their value-expressive function (Katz 1960). In other words, individuals derive satisfaction from expressing attitudes appropriate to their personal values and their self-concept. In my dissertation, I explore the consequences of this link between values and attitudes. In Essay 1 (Catapano, Tormala, & Rucker 2019, Psychological Science), I explore this relationship in a self-persuasion context. I find that, despite the common wisdom that perspective-taking improves intergroup relationships, when individuals try to take the other side's perspective in an argument generation context, they generate arguments that are incongruent with their own values. As a result, they are less receptive to the opposition, and show less attitude change. In Essay 2, I explore how values affect attitude sharing. I find that individuals view their attitudes as more value expressive when those attitudes are framed in terms of positions they support rather than positions they oppose. As a result, individuals are more likely to share their views when they think in terms of support rather than opposition--even when the two are logically equivalent (e.g. supporting "gun control is good" versus opposing "gun control is bad"). This effect is also driven by a perception that expressing an attitude in terms of what an individual supports leads to greater liking than expressing the same attitude in terms of what they oppose. Together, these essays enhance our understanding of values and the role they play in attitude expression and persuasion