BIO

I am a Post-Doctoral Associate in the Division of Social Sciences at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD). Previously, I obtained my PhD in Social Sciences from California Institute of Technology and MS in Quantitative Economics from Indian Statistical Institute (Delhi). My research interests lie in the field of microeconomic theory, with a focus on mechanism design and social choice.

RESEARCH

Working papers

  • Optimality of weighted contracts for multi-agent contract design with a budget
    (with Wade Hann-Caruthers)

    We study a contract design problem between a principal and multiple agents. Each agent participates in an independent task with binary outcomes (success or failure), in which it may exert costly effort towards improving its probability of success, and the principal has a fixed budget which it can use to provide outcome-dependent rewards to the agents. Crucially, each agent's reward may depend not only on whether she succeeds or fails, but also on whether other agents succeed or fail, and we assume the principal cares only about maximizing the agents' probabilities of success, not how much of the budget it expends.
    We first show that a contract is optimal for some objective if and only if it gives no reward to unsuccessful agents and always splits the entire budget among the successful agents. An immediate consequence of this result is that piece-rate contracts and bonus-pool contracts, two types of contracts which are well-studied and motivated in the literature on multi-agent contract design, are never optimal in this setting. We then show that for any objective, there is an optimal priority-based weighted contract, which assigns positive weights and priority levels to the agents, and splits the budget among the highest-priority successful agents, with each such agent receiving a fraction of the budget proportional to her weight. This result provides a significant reduction in the dimensionality of the principal's optimal contract design problem and gives an interpretable and easily implementable optimal contract.
    Finally, we discuss an application of our results to the design of optimal contracts with two agents and quadratic costs. In this context, we find that the optimal contract assigns a higher weight to the agent whose success it values more, irrespective of the heterogeneity in the agents' cost parameters. This suggests that the structure of the optimal contract depends primarily on the bias in the principal's objective and is, to some extent, robust to the heterogeneity in the agents' cost functions.

  • Optimal grading contests
    Best paper award at Delhi Winter School 2022
    Ext. abst. in Proc. of EC 2023

    We study the design of grading contests between agents with private information about their abilities under the assumption that the value of a grade is determined by the information it reveals about the agent’s productivity. Towards the goal of identifying the effort-maximizing grading contest, we study the effect of increasing prizes and increasing competition on effort and find that the effects depend qualitatively on the distribution of abilities in the population. Consequently, while the optimal grading contest always uniquely identifies the best performing agent, it may want to pool or separate the remaining agents depending upon the distribution. We identify sufficient conditions under which a rank-revealing grading contest, a leaderboard-with-cutoff type grading contest, and a coarse grading contest with at most three grades are optimal. In the process, we also identify distributions under which there is a monotonic relationship between the informativeness of a grading scheme and the effort induced by it.

  • Stable allocations in discrete exchange economies
    (with Federico Echenique and SangMok Lee)
    R&R at Journal of Economic Theory

    We study stable allocations in an exchange economy with indivisible goods. The problem is well-known to be challenging, and rich enough to encode fundamentally unstable economies, such as the roommate problem. Our approach stems from generalizing the original study of an exchange economy with unit demand and unit endowments, the housing model. Our first approach uses Scarf's theorem, and proposes sufficient conditions under which a ``convexify then round'' technique ensures that the core is nonempty. The upshot is that a core allocation exists in categorical economies with dichotomous preferences. Our second approach uses a generalization of the TTC: it works under general conditions, and finds a solution that is a version of the stable set.

  • Project selection with partially verifiable information
    (with Wade Hann-Caruthers)
    Ext. abst. in Proc. of WINE 2022

    We consider a principal agent project selection problem with asymmetric information. There are N projects and the principal must select exactly one of them. Each project provides some profit to the principal and some payoff to the agent and these profits and payoffs are the agent's private information. We consider the principal's problem of finding an optimal mechanism for two different objectives: maximizing expected profit and maximizing the probability of choosing the most profitable project. Importantly, we assume partial verifiability so that the agent cannot report a project to be more profitable to the principal than it actually is. Under this no-overselling constraint, we characterize the set of implementable mechanisms. Using this characterization, we find that in the case of two projects, the optimal mechanism under both objectives takes the form of a simple cutoff mechanism. The simple structure of the optimal mechanism also allows us to find evidence in support of the well-known ally-principle which says that principal delegates more authority to an agent who shares their preferences.

Publications

  • Optimal tie-breaking rules
    (with Amit Goyal)
    Published in Journal of Mathematical Economics

    We consider two-player contests with the possibility of ties and study the effect of different tie-breaking rules on effort. For ratio-form and difference-form contests that admit pure-strategy Nash equilibrium, we find that the effort of both players is monotone decreasing in the probability that ties are broken in favor of the stronger player. Thus, the effort-maximizing tie-breaking rule commits to breaking ties in favor of the weaker agent. With symmetric agents, we find that the equilibrium is generally symmetric and independent of the tie-breaking rule. We also study the design of random tie-breaking rules that are unbiased ex-ante and identify sufficient conditions under which breaking ties before the contest actually leads to greater expected effort than the more commonly observed practice of breaking ties after the contest.

  • Optimality of the coordinate-wise median mechanism for strategyproof facility location in two dimensions
    (with Wade Hann-Caruthers)
    Ext. abst. in Proc. of SAGT 2022
    Published in Social Choice and Welfare

    We consider the facility location problem in two dimensions. In particular, we consider a setting where agents have Euclidean preferences, defined by their ideal points, for a facility to be located in \(\mathbb{R}^2\). We show that for the p-norm (\(p \geq 1\)) objective, the coordinate-wise median mechanism (CM) has the lowest worst-case approximation ratio in the class of deterministic, anonymous, and strategyproof mechanisms. For the minisum objective and an odd number of agents \(n\), we show that CM has a worst-case approximation ratio (AR) of \(\sqrt{2}\frac{\sqrt{n^2+1}}{n+1}\). For the p-norm social cost objective (\(p\geq 2\)), we find that the AR for CM is bounded above by \(2^{\frac{3}{2}-\frac{2}{p}}\). We conjecture that the AR of CM actually equals the lower bound \(2^{1-\frac{1}{p}}\) (as is the case for \(p=2\) and \(p=\infty\)) for any \(p\geq 2\).

TEACHING

Instructor at NYU Abu Dhabi

  • ECON-UH 2010: Intermediate Microeconomics (Spring 2024)

Instructor at Econschool

Econschool is an initiative to assist undergraduate students in India who wish to pursue higher studies in Economics. As an instructor, I've taught a course on mathematics for economists and also helped with the development and delivery of various online resources.

Teaching Assistant at Caltech

  • Ec 122: Econometrics
  • Ec 11: Introduction to economics [edX]
  • BEM 103: Introduction to finance
  • PS/Ec 172: Game theory [notes]
  • Ec 121A: Theory of value [notes]
  • CS/Ec 149: Algorithmic economics [notes]