Category: Working papers

Stereotypes Are More Powerful When People Like to Agree with Each Other (2016)

I find that among 119 academic fields, the more skewed the citation distribution of papers published in the field, the lower the percentage of doctoral recipients who are women. If the citation distribution in a field is more skewed, a smaller percentage of papers receive most of the citations, which indicates a greater preference to agree on which papers should be cited. This empirical result illustrates the argument, which I make in a game-theoretic model, that stereotypes are more powerful when people like to agree with each other.

The data used in this paper is available here.

Incentive Compatibility Implies Signed Covariance (2006)

When a person’s payoff depends on both her action and probabilistic events, the action she chooses and her payoff can be understood as random variables.  This paper shows that incentive compatibility implies that when a person chooses among two actions, conditional on these two actions, her action is nonnegatively correlated with the payoff difference between the two actions.  This simple and robust result has implications in a wide variety of contexts, including individual choice under uncertainty, strategic form games, and incomplete information games.  Incentive compatibility constraints have an immediate “statistical” interpretation.

Strategic Reliability of Communication Networks (1995)

This paper offers a game theoretic analysis of how an organization’s choice of network depends both on the available communications technology and the underlying strategic situation the organization faces.  The paper develops a notation for modelling communication devices and looks at the choice of optimal network in three “coordinated attack” examples.