Abstract: We study exploding offers by considering the strategic interaction between a low-tier firm and a set of workers within a large job market. Each worker has a private value for the firm and may receive offers from preferred top-tier firms according to an exogenous stochastic process. We show that more risk averse workers receive offers with shorter deadlines, and that there is a level of risk aversion beyond which a worker only receives offers that expire as soon as possible—independently of what all other firms are doing. If workers are sufficiently risk averse, the workers’ expected welfare is maximized if and only if exploding offers are banned. Finally, any minimal offer length that does not ban exploding offers may lead to workers falling through the cracks. All results are robust to a range of sequentially-rational strategies for the workers. Our predictions match existing evidence and have implications for policies regulating exploding offers.

[Draft coming soon]

Presented at (by coauthor or myself): 2023 EEA-ESEM, UBA, UTDT

Abstract: We study how remembrance of an authoritarian regime affects privacy concerns, leveraging Germany's strong culture of Holocaust remembrance. One example of this culture of remembrance are the Stolpersteine, plaques on the sidewalk signaling that a victim of Nazi persecution lived at a given address. We use a detailed street level imagery dataset of Berlin to study how Stolpersteine affect a novel geolocated measure of privacy concerns: whether a person asks for their building to be blurred on an online street-level imagery provider. To isolate causality, we leverage the quasi-experimental variation in Stolpersteine location once we control for the victims' location patterns around each address. We show that Stolpersteine cause a localized increase in blurring, as most of their effect on blurring concentrates within 10 meters of a Stolperstein. Furthermore, we show through an experimental survey that when Germans are primed to think about the Stolpersteine and Nazi persecution, they respond by spending more time on the experiment's final consent form, which constitutes another novel measure of privacy concerns.

[Draft] [SSRN]

Presented at (by coauthor or myself): ASREC 2023, ASSA 2024, 2023 EHES Conference, 2023 European Meeting of the UEA, Paris Dauphine University-PSL, UdeSA, UTDT

Abstract: I derive the incentive compatible and individually rational mechanism that maximizes the sum of the buyers' ex-ante expected utilities. I also show that this mechanism minimizes the seller's revenue. When payments are required to be non-negative, my mechanism takes the form of an arbitrarily weighted lottery with no participation fees, and the resulting allocation is generally not ex-post efficient. This means that before learning their valuations and if side payments from the seller to the buyers are not allowed, buyers as a group would be better off if they gave up ex-post efficiency in order to avoid positive payments. When transfers are allowed, the optimal mechanism is a standard auction with no reserve price and where the seller's income is redistributed back to the buyers. This mechanism is robust to speculators if a buyer with value 0 never partakes in the redistribution.

[Draft] [Published]