Research

You can read about my research agenda here.

Optimal Allocation with Noisy Inspection [draft] [slides]

In a standard principal-agent allocation model, endow the agent with a noisy private signal about the principal's return and allow the principal to inspect the return at a cost. The inspection and allocation mechanism that maximizes the principal's expected return without the use of transfers describes optimal inspection as both an exploration and a screening tool. This relates to many important applied settings including employer hiring strategies, public grant mechanisms and portfolio investment rules.

Bonus material: [simple summary] [short slides]

Strategic Private Exploration [abstract] [draft forthcoming]

In a strategic exploration game, multiple players determine the order in which they explore unknown options with the objective of maximizing the sum of discovered rewards. Exploration is private in the sense that players cannot condition the order in which they explore on their competitor's decisions. Equilibrium exploration procedures are determined, and losses characterized as a function of how the rewards are split when simultaneously explored. This informs us about many areas of policy design including patent and copyright regimes, R&D tournaments, and competition regulation.

Pandora's Linear Program w/ Rakesh Vohra [abstract] [draft forthcoming]

In this article, we map Weitzman's canonical search problem into a linear program that allows us to re-derive existing results and extend the setup to problems pertaining to strategic search, information acquisition, index manipulation and robust search.

Optimal Allocation with Noisy Search and Sequential Testing

Manipulation Robust Search Procedures

Renewables and Strategic Storage

Optimally Screening Mergers

Professor Rohan Pitchford at the ANU Research School of Economics, 2015-2016

Professor Peter Drysdale and Dr. Shiro Armstrong at the East Asia Bureau of Economic Research at the ANU Crawford School of Public Policy, 2015-2016

Dr. Paul Chen and Dr. Martin Richardson at the ANU Research School of Economics conducting behavioural experiments, 2016

Dr. Juergen Meinecke at the ANU Research School of Economics in econometrics, 2015

Economic Analyst at the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) in the Weighted Average Cost of Capital team at the Australian Energy Regulator (AER), 2014