arXiv preprints from January 1, 2026 through September 5, 2026 — 06:20:24 EST
Immediate Acceptance (IA, also known as the Boston mechanism) is commonly used to assign students to schools because it produces a Pareto-efficient matching if parents report their preferences over schools truthfully, unlike student-proposing Deferred Acceptance (DA). In this paper, we ask: does IA produce meaningfully better average...
We develop a general framework of identification and estimation for automatic debiased machine learning (DML) where the parameter of interest $θ_0$ is identified by a moment condition involving a nuisance $γ_0$ that may be high dimensional. DML leverages machine learning to estimate $γ_0$ while correcting for regularization and...
Market design research in economics naturally focusses on how to improve market efficiency. Our objective here is exactly the opposite - how to design interventions that make a market less efficient. Our research is inspired by the growth of illicit markets online where reducing their efficiency may reduce societal harm. Using a...
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate data for research. Typical use cases are classifications, annotations, information extraction, and generation of numerical scores. Unlike conventional measurements, LLM outputs can vary across repeated requests even when the prompt and apparent model settings remain...
The Gini index remains the most important measure of economic inequality worldwide, and accurate estimates of this index are essential for effective public policies. Yet, Gini estimates for the same country and year vary considerably across data sources, a problem that remains largely unresolved. The paper reviews the largest global...
This paper examines the tension between the benefits of generative artificial intelligence (AI) for scientific research and the unresolved governance questions that accompany its rapid adoption. Drawing on an academic roundtable held at the AI for Science and Innovation Workshop (Scuola IMT Alti Studi Lucca, April 2026) and on a...
It is obvious to say that an adequate estimation of the autocorrelation function is central in time series analysis. In this paper, we propose three new robust estimators based on ratios of observations, which offer strong resistance against outliers. While the first estimator, which is based on the median, is not efficient, the...
I critique a set of entrenched methodological conventions that collectively create systemic dysfunction in statistical research for clinical decisions. These include: (1) the prevalent use of hypothesis tests to compare treatments, (2) remoteness from patient care of the methods used to evaluate the accuracy of predictions of patient...
Firms covered by emissions trading systems need forecasts not only to value allowances, but also to decide when to buy them. This paper asks whether European Union Allowance (EUA) prices contain short-horizon predictability that survives a forecast-origin information design and improves simulated compliance procurement. Using daily...
A red herring, an irrelevant passage added to a problem, makes a language model reason incorrectly and answer incorrectly far more often. Yet the model still writes out a full explanation, and the answer it gives remains consistent with the steps it shows. The red herring corrupts the reasoning, while leaving the explanation intact...
When does the global game information structure select a unique equilibrium? Limit uniqueness in two-player supermodular games fails exactly when a risk-dominant better response cycle exists (Veiel, 2025). We show that rank-one factor structure on payoffs eliminates such cycles entirely, so every rank-one supermodular game admits a...
Age is a match trait and a prominent label on search platforms. Using confidential records from a large Japanese marriage platform, I study how a birthday age update affects consideration, applications, relationship progression, and engagement. Only displayed age updates at birthdays. Receivers enter some acceptable-age ranges as they...
Rigorous economic models can take months to construct, yet energy crises demand decisions from policymakers within days or even hours. Any disruption in energy markets is not isolated but rapidly disseminates through interlinked global systems. Off-the-shelf models that already exist typically focus only on limited aspects of the...
We study the optimal design and analysis of experiments for estimating spillover effects. Assuming a known (e.g., linear) exposure mapping, we characterize the treatment-assignment distribution and regression-based estimator that minimize worst-case asymptotic variance against a broad class of distributions of unobservables. The...
A transaction can allocate a product and create information unavailable before consumption. We study dynamic pricing when a pricing agent and a buying agent hold different estimates of match value, traded outcomes update a public belief, and attributed extraction depreciates relationship capital. Public learning polarizes exchange:...
We discuss the problem of limit cycles in an aggregate-type models of liquidity growth proposed and studied both theoretically and numerically by W. Semmler and M. Sieveking in \cite{SemmlerSieveking}. Their model is locally of predator-prey type with cannibalism in predator (profit) and logistic bound on prey's population...
We study the optimal design and analysis of experiments for estimating spillover effects. Assuming a known (e.g., linear) exposure mapping, we characterize the treatment-assignment distribution and regression-based estimator that minimize worst-case asymptotic variance against a broad class of distributions of unobservables. The...
For four agents with nonnegative additive valuations, a complete 1-out-of-5 maximin-share allocation always exists, improving the previous 1-out-of-6 guarantee. Together with known exact-MMS counterexamples, this completely characterizes the four-agent case: the guarantee holds exactly for $d\geq5$. The main technical contribution is...
Equilibrium play in two-player zero-sum games is usually justified via epistemic assumptions, such as mutual knowledge of rationality and beliefs, that go far beyond the rationality of the players. We propose a justification that dispenses with these assumptions. To this end, we consider solution concepts that assign to every subgame...
A large literature uses exogenous variation to estimate how assignment to classrooms or other groups shapes social networks. Yet most of these analyses remain dyadic, treating each link in isolation, even though ties often form through triadic closure, as a friend of a friend also becomes a friend. Using fine-grained data on phone...
A collective tourism brand is jointly produced by assets managed by different custodians, so destination managers must decide which assets require collective protection. We model a destination as a gate times a menu. The gate combines essential inputs and non-reproducible anchors as a weaker-link public good; the menu combines many...
We derive necessary and sufficient nonparametric conditions for several models of mental accounting. The paper characterises pure mental accounting, separable accounts, and labelled income, and compares these boundedly rational models with two rational multi-stage budgeting benchmarks. The resulting Afriat-style conditions make the...
Over the past decade, governments around the world have made significant investments in creating elderly-friendly urban environments within local neighborhoods. However, the lack of a standardized evaluation framework for Ageing-in-Place (AIP) practices makes it challenging to generalize these experiences. First, we compare the AIP...
This study investigates the impact of social integration on immigrants' housing behaviours from a temporal perspective, using Singapore's differential public housing policies on immigrants as a quasi-natural experiment. With the support of a local town council, we conducted a survey on social integration among 1,128 immigrant and...
Instrumental-variables estimation increasingly pools many or high-dimensional instruments into a single machine-learned first stage, with rich controls partialled out. The resulting estimand, the partialled-out IV coefficient built from any signal of the instruments, is a signal-weighted average of the heterogeneous effects, which...