Research

Publications

Best vs. All: Equity and Accuracy of Standardized Test Score Reporting with Sampath Kannan, Aaron Roth, and Rakesh Vohra

FAccT'22: 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency,  574–586 

This paper emphasizes a source of unfairness that arises from the fact that only some applicants have the resources to take standardized tests multiple times. We find that, compared to super-scoring, requiring that all scores be reported results in superior equilibrium outcomes in admission accuracy and equity across populations. This is the case even though the more highly resourced students can—at their option—either report a more accurate signal of their type, or pool with the lower resourced population under this policy. The study represents an unusual situation where the goals of accuracy and equity are in alignment.

Working Papers

1. Motivated Misspecification

I propose a model of expectation management to study how an interactive environment breeds and perpetuates a certain type of misperception. This paper provides a novel approach to incentivize effort (perception manipulation), complementary to the usual monetary or informational incentives studied in principal-agent theory. It endogenizes model misspecification in the literature of misspecified learning in a principal-agent framework and can be applied to a wide range of interactions such as mentor-mentee, parent-child, self-manipulation, and emotional abuse in professional or intimate relationships.

2. Procrastination and Commitment

I propose a tractable model of procrastination. I show that behavioral frictions (i.e., present bias and naivete) and task frictions (i.e., a heavy workload or a close deadline) reinforce each other in affecting the agent’s welfare. Furthermore, for a present-biased agent, although full commitment can strictly enhance welfare, partial commitment—in the sense that the agent cannot always commit her actions when she gets to make a move—is nevertheless harmful.

3. Signaling Design with Matteo Camboni, Mallesh M. Pai, and Rakesh Vohra

We revisit the classic job-market signaling model of Spence (1973), introducing profit-seeking intermediaries that design the signaling options available in the market. We show that a monopolist school captures the entire social surplus by committing to uninformative signals and charging high fees. In contrast, competing schools vie to attract high-ability students by providing more informative signals about abilities with lower fees, which induces wasteful effort. This result contrasts with the usual argument that competition enhances social efficiency—it may be reversed if schools face binding fee caps.

4. Multilateral War of Attrition with Majority Rule  with Hülya Eraslan and Kirill S. Evdokimov

In multilateral bargaining with majority rule, a reputation for being stubborn can harm the player's chances of being included in the first place. In this paper, we study a three-player concession game in which only two players, including a veto player (the chair), are needed to reach an agreement on how to split a unit of surplus. In contrast to the bilateral case, delay equilibria are less likely to occur; however, conditional on delay, the chair may be worse off when bargaining with two players instead of only one player.

5. Trust or Stigmatization? Evidence From De-Anonymizing Social Media in China with Yiqian Wang and Ziang Xiao; new draft coming soon!

Anonymity protects the freedom of speech whereas burgeoning misinformation from anonymous sources compels platforms to promote identity transparency.  Leveraging recent Chinese social media regulations and text analysis advancements, we find that reduced anonymity substantially decreases politically marginalized groups' representation. We motivate our empirical results using a theoretical framework and investigate how the intergroup gap in media biases affects participation in social media. Our findings highlight that, under media biases, identity transparency intensifies political polarization.

Work in Progress

How does present bias affect households' refinancing decisions? We first characterize the closed-form solution of the optimal refinancing threshold for present-biased households, and then use the data of U.S. mortgage refinance choices and matched household demographics to explain refinancing inaction that was not captured well in classic models.

A principal needs to delegate information collection to agents, and agents differ in their privately known ability of information acquisition. What is the optimal approval mechanism for the principal to make the right decision? Is it better to let the principal specify the information collection regime (e.g., when to report)  or allow the agent, who has the information advantage, to have the discretion?

How to incorporate the notion of Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) in cryptography into economics? Loosely speaking, ZKP requires the interactions between a prover and a verifier that yield no extra information other than the validation of the claim. It guarantees data privacy and information safety in a decentralized economic system, especially with the technology of blockchain.