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ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)

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posts updates from arXiv rss feeds for methodology papers in Economic Theory and General Economics. maintainer: @paulgp.com source code: https://github.com/paulgp/bsky_paperbot [forked from Apoorva Lal]

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ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)@arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · 15m ago

arXiv📈🤖 Pay Beliefs and the Amenity-Pay Tradeoff By Andresen, Bhuller, L{\o}vgren

This paper studies how workers' beliefs about pay shape the tradeoffs between pay and workplace amenities. We design a multi-stage incentivized survey experiment that combines hypothetical choice experiments with elicited beliefs about starting salaries in real jobs and randomly varies the provision of explicit pay information. Although stated preferences imply sizable willingness to pay for amenities consistent with prior literature, baseline beliefs about salaries in real jobs are systematically biased along two margins: respondents under-predict starting salaries by 18% and expect higher-amenity jobs to pay more, substantially over-predicting the amenity-pay gradient. Exposure to pay information raises mean pay beliefs for similar jobs by 4% and reduces belief dispersion by 15%, but does not alter the strong positive association between perceived pay and advertised amenities, leaving the amenity-pay tradeoffs in stated choices essentially unchanged. While workers have strong preferences for workplace amenities, the tradeoffs they perceive deviate sharply from those present under full information.

ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)@arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · 13h ago

arXiv📈🤖 Global Inequalities in Clinical Trials Participation By Lou, D\'iaz-Faes, He et al

Clinical trials are fundamental to the production of medical evidence and determine who gains access to experimental therapies. Although prior work has long documented inequalities in global clinical trial participation, a systematic quantification of the relative contributions of country-level factors and disease burden remains absent. This paper analyzes inequality in participation across 78,117 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) spanning 16 major disease categories from 2000 to 2024. Linking 185.6 million RCTs participants to country-level disease burden, the paper shows that inequalities in RCTs participation are predominantly explained by country-level factors rather than disease burden. Country-level factors account for 88.9% of the variation in participation, whereas disease and temporal effects contribute marginally. Removing entire disease categories, including those traditionally underfunded, has little effect on overall inequality. Instead, participation is highly concentrated geographically, with a small group of Global North countries enrolling a disproportionate share of participants across nearly all diseases. These patterns persist despite decades of disease-targeted funding and increasing alignment between research efforts and disease burden. Findings also show that without parallel horizontal investments in research capacity, health infrastructure, and governance, even well-funded disease programs are insufficient to reduce inequality in clinical trial participation.

ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)@arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · 13h ago

arXiv📈🤖 Divide and Confer: Aggregating Information without Verification By Best, Quigley, Saeedi et al

We examine receiver-optimal mechanisms for aggregating information divided across many biased senders. Each sender privately observes an unconditionally independent signal about an unknown state, so no sender can verify another's report. A receiver makes a binary accept/reject decision that determines the players' payoffs via the state. When information is divided across a small population, and bias is low, the receiver-optimal mechanism coincides with the sender-preferred allocation, and can be implemented by letting senders confer privately before reporting. However, for larger populations, the receiver can benefit from the informational divide. We introduce a novel incentive-compatibility-in-the-large approach to solve the high-dimensional mechanism design problem for the large-population limit. Using this, we show that optimal mechanisms converge to one that depends only on the accept payoff and punishes excessive consensus in the direction of the common bias. These surplus burning punishments lead to payoffs that are bounded away from the first-best.

ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)@arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · 13h ago

arXiv📈🤖 Incentivizing Forecasters to Learn: Summarized vs. Unrestricted Advice By Li, Libgober

How should forecasters be incentivized to acquire the most information when learning takes place over time? We address this question in the context of a novel dynamic mechanism design problem in which a designer incentivizes an expert to learn by conditioning rewards on an event's outcome and the expert's reports. Eliciting summarized advice at a terminal date maximizes information acquisition if an informative signal either fully reveals the outcome or has predictable content. Otherwise, richer reporting capabilities may be required. Our findings shed light on incentive design for consultation and forecasting by illustrating how learning dynamics shape the qualitative properties of effort-maximizing contracts.

ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)@arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · 13h ago

arXiv📈🤖 Approximating Choice Data by Discrete Choice Models By Chang, Narita, Saito

We obtain a necessary and sufficient condition under which random-coefficient discrete choice models, such as mixed-logit models, are rich enough to approximate any nonparametric random utility models arbitrarily well across choice sets. The condition turns out to be the affine-independence of the set of characteristic vectors. When the condition fails, resulting in some random utility models that cannot be closely approximated, we identify preferences and substitution patterns that are challenging to approximate accurately. We also propose algorithms to quantify the magnitude of approximation errors.

ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)@arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · 13h ago

arXiv📈🤖 Preference robust distortion risk measures By Bernard, Pesenti

We introduce a framework for preference-robust decision making when preferences over risk are modelled through generalised distortion risk measures. Unlike distributional robustness, our approach addresses ambiguity in the risk functional itself. We construct ambiguity sets on distortion (weight) functions using the Wasserstein distance and Bregman divergences, and derive closed-form expressions for the worst- and best-case distortion risk measures. We further extend the framework to rank-dependent utility, yielding preference-robust behavioural models. In particular, rank-dependent utility appears as a robustification of the expected utility model, yielding a novel way to address the Allais paradox.

ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)@arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · 13h ago

arXiv📈🤖 When Does Party Convergence Persist under Alienation-Based Abstention? By Ray, Pai

$In the standard Downsian model, two office-seeking parties converge to the median voter. However alienated voters may abstain and turn out only for a party within their tolerance radius. For single-peaked voter distributions, convergence survives but relocates to a central voter, the median of the electorate that participates at the convergent platform. However single-peakedness of the voter distribution is an empirically contested assumption. So we first characterize pure-strategy equilibrium for any continuous voter distribution. For general distributions, pure-strategy equilibrium can fail to exist or be non-unique, and existence of equilibrium need not persist as the tolerance radius of the voters increases. In order to resolve these issues, we propose a fundamental object: \emph{centripetal} structure for which there is a single anchor platform toward which competition always pulls. We show this structure produces convergence at equilibrium under alienation based abstention. Our main result concerns the emergence and persistence of this new structure as the tolerance radius increases. Even though equilibria for office-seeking parties themselves can vanish and reappear as the radius grows, once centripetal structure emerges, it persists as long as the midpoint voter is not alienated. Moreover, the centripetal structure always emerges, and this structure classifies equilibrium completely when parties are policy motivated.$

ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)@arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · 13h ago

arXiv📈🤖 Effort without Evidence By Lukyanov

Actions determine not only payoffs but what can be learned. I study communication across successive decision makers when hidden effort governs public evidence and a sender motivates her successor while underweighting effort cost. Common sender rankings can force every message into a Bayes-unavoidable nonidentifying region. If experimentation is costly, strong motivation can make persuasive encouragement incredible and produce inactivity after a confounded failure. If maximal effort is technologically saturated, the same bias can produce universal overexertion after a bad pooled history, which is equally uninformative. At such nodes collapse is monotone: once strong motivation eliminates the identifying action, strengthening it cannot restore information. Moderate motivation instead preserves causal distinctions. In a threshold application, stronger motivation raises measured success yet lowers welfare because society fails to learn that less effort would suffice. A Kullback--Leibler decomposition shows that certification directly adds no information after entry into a fixed recursively nonidentifying region. Whether it prevents entry depends on attribution--selection alignment: do certificate-induced posteriors preserve the identifying action? The corrective action payment changes sign across technologies---subsidize effort when agents do too little, but subsidize restraint when maximal effort is saturated. Motivation selects the costly action, not the informative one.

ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)@arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · 13h ago

arXiv📈🤖 Synthetic supply networks By Ng, Mungo, Bertrand et al

A good representation of the population of firms and households is essential for large-scale economic models. While there exist good methods to create synthetic populations of households, creating synthetic populations of firms and, crucially, their supply chain links, is typically much harder. Here, we introduce a flexible method to create synthetic supply networks that match both the known properties of firm-level supply networks and the properties of aggregated input-output tables used in macroeconomic models. Our method is fast, and because it uses only publicly available data, it is fully reproducible and can be easily extended.

ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)@arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · 13h ago

arXiv📈🤖 Preying on Leveraged ETFs By Zhao

We argue that the extreme volatility of the Korean market in 2026 was driven by arbitrageurs preying on the closing rebalance of leveraged exchange-traded funds (LETFs). An LETF must trade in the direction of the day's move at a close that also measures it, so its demand rises in price, and arbitrageurs buying ahead of it enlarge the order by trading at the print, then unload into what they manufactured. As predicted, pre-open U.S. news is reversed one day later in Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix once their products list, and in no control group. At measured parameters the loop added forty-seven percentage points of annualized volatility and transferred KRW 4 trillion from retail holders in eight weeks. Dispersing the rebalance through the session, Korea's chosen remedy, moves the order but not the reference that sizes it and can raise the toll. Changing the reference works instead: an average of two prints halves what displacing either can manufacture.

ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)@arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · 13h ago

arXiv📈🤖 Transnational political violence in African borderlands By Russell, Walther

This paper examines the relationship between borderlands and political violence in Africa. Using spatiotemporal data on conflict events from 1997 to 2024 alongside the innovative OECD Spatial Conflict Dynamics indicator (SCDi), it suggests that borderlands see more conflict than non-borderlands. Political violence tends to decrease very rapidly with the distance to borders in Africa. The share of violent events recorded in borderlands varies over time and mirrors the cycles of violence that affect specific regions. It was very high in the early 2000s due to the wars in the Gulf of Guinea and Great Lakes region, declined for less than a decade, and increased substantially in the 2010s. Finally, the paper shows that when conflicts diffuse across borders, they tend to occupy a greater spatial extent, rather than relocate from one side of the border to the other.

ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)@arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · 13h ago

arXiv📈🤖 Cities and political violence in West Africa By Radil, Walther

This paper examines how political violence in West Africa is distributed between urban agglomerations and their surrounding areas using spatially disaggregated conflict and population data. Covering seventeen countries from 2012 to mid-2025, the analysis shows that political violence remains clearly tied to cities and their peripheries with the majority of violence occurring within and around urban agglomerations. Large cities record the highest number of incidents within their boundaries, while smaller towns, which are more frequently situated near borders, typically experience higher levels of violence outside their boundaries. However, urban-centric violence has also declined since 2012, indicating a progressive ruralization of conflict. These findings provide important regional context to the urbanization of conflict narrative by showing that West African insurgent movements use both urban and rural environments strategically. They also underscore the ongoing vulnerability of peripheral populations and the need for mobile and community-based security approaches outside major cities. Finally, they highlight the importance of strengthening border infrastructure, transport networks, and civic institutions as tools of both development and security.

ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)@arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · 13h ago

arXiv📈🤖 Stochastic Choice with Advertising By Petri, Wang

We study how advertised products (e.g., Top Picks, Recommended, Featured) affect consumer choice on digital platforms and retail interfaces by extending the Luce (1959) (or multinomial logit) model. A consumer either focuses on the advertised items or considers the full menu, then chooses among the considered alternatives according to the Luce/logit rule. We characterize this model and show that its underlying primitives are uniquely identified from choice data. We also study a managerially important advertisement-design problem, in which a platform or retailer chooses the advertised subset to maximize expected profit, and we derive implementable design rules. We then introduce a richer framework in which advertising can influence both attention and preference. For this more general model, we provide a characterization and show how choice data can be used to separate the attention effect from the preference effect.

ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)@arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · 13h ago

arXiv📈🤖 Stable Matching with Payoff Guarantees By Pourpouneh, Ramezanian, Sen et al

We consider a variant of the Assignment Game of Shapley and Shubik (1971), where agents do not observe the assignment or the surplus division of other matched pairs. We propose a set-valued solution concept (Self-Stabilizing Set) and characterize the largest such set. This leads to the formulation of the Stable Payoff Guarantee (SPG) set, which assumes that agents receive at least their payoff guarantees and that this is common knowledge. Our main result is that, for generic surplus matrices, the SPG set consists only of the efficient assignment. The associated payoff vectors are given by the smallest interval that contains the worker-optimal and firm-optimal stable payoffs.

ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)@arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · 13h ago

arXiv📈🤖 Digital State Capacity By Economics, School, University et al

Digital State Capacity is the ability of governments to deploy ICT infrastructure and information systems to implement policy. This paper introduces a new measure of government ICT capacity based on an observable stock of deployable public-sector network infrastructure: public IPv4 address space held by government organisations. These address holdings are key inputs into digital administration because they support internet-facing systems, networked information exchange, and coordination across agencies and functions. The core panel covers approximately 150,000 country-entity records classified as government across more than 150 countries from 2019 to 2024 and can be disaggregated by administrative level and government function. In the 2019 to 2024 Admin-1 panel, government IP holdings are observed in 1,681 subnational regions across all years. We validate the measure at the crosscountry and subnational levels and apply it to government tasks related to corruption control and vaccination rollout. In illustrative country-year analysis, higher Digital State Capacity is associated with higher-quality governance and publicservice outcomes in the expected directions, including lower measured corruption and higher vaccination coverage. These associations are descriptive; they demonstrate the empirical relevance of the measure and are not causal estimates.

ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)@arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · 13h ago

arXiv📈🤖 Does the Gender Wage Gap Originate at Labor Market Entry? Evidence from South Korea By Kim

When in the lifecycle does a large gender wage gap emerge? South Korea has the largest gender pay gap in the OECD, 29%. Among recent college graduates the conditional gap is only 4.3% over 2008-2019, falling from 5.0% to 3.0%, and correcting for differential selection into full-time wage employment with semiparametric, machine-learning, and bounds methods leaves it unchanged. Among observed workers what remains sits at the top of the distribution. In Korean panel data the corrected gap widens severalfold across the prime-age workforce, where the selection correction becomes first order. Korea's gender disparity is mostly generated after entry.

ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)@arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · 13h ago

arXiv📈🤖 Optimal Liability Design for Medical AI By Mao, Huang, Shen

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly integrated into medical decision-making, yet its liability implications remain complex, particularly when physicians differ in diagnostic skills and their quality is unobservable. This paper develops a principal-agent model in which a social planner designs medical liability to regulate a physician with private quality information who chooses between a standard treatment, a personalized judgment-based treatment, or following an imperfect AI recommendation. Our analysis yields several novel insights. First, we show that the optimal mechanism under asymmetric information is surprisingly simple: a uniform, one-size-fits-all liability level for all physician types who deviate from the standard of care. Despite physician heterogeneity, this simple policy often achieves the full-information first-best outcome, particularly when standard care is reliable or AI is highly accurate. Second, the relationship between AI accuracy and optimal liability is non-monotonic. Contrary to common intuition, better AI does not always imply more relaxed liability. As AI accuracy increases, the optimal liability either decreases monotonically or follows an inverted-U pattern, depending on the uncertainty of the standard treatment. Third, asymmetric information does not universally reduce social welfare. Welfare loss arises only when standard care is unreliable and AI accuracy is too low; even then, its magnitude follows an inverted U-shape, initially increasing as AI complicates the regulatory problem, but declining as more accurate AI helps mitigate it. Finally, we find that information asymmetry is a double-edged sword in the presence of AI, and greater transparency does not benefit all stakeholders equally.

ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)@arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · 13h ago

arXiv📈🤖 Reviving Micro Real Rigidities: The Importance of Demand Shocks By Aruoba, Oue, Saffie et al

We revisit micro real rigidities as a source of monetary non-neutrality in a menu-cost model with variable markups, using firm-level evidence to pin down key primitives. We embed a non-CES demand system in a quantitative monetary model and use firm-dynamics evidence to identify demand curvature and firm-level productivity and demand processes. The calibrated model matches untargeted micro pricing moments, the markup distribution, and cost pass-through, while generating comparable non-neutrality. The key innovation is an empirically supported placement of idiosyncratic demand shocks that shifts residual demand, thereby moving desired markups and prices under non-CES demand. The broader implication is that this calibrated model provides a portable framework linking monetary economics with trade and IO evidence.

ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)@arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · 13h ago

arXiv📈🤖 Raising Rivals' Costs on Hybrid Platforms: The Complementarity of Fees and Self-Preferencing By Rabbani, Dubey

Hybrid platforms disadvantage third-party sellers through the platform fee and self-preferencing, and regulators have worried that constraining either instrument may intensify the other. We model a platform that chooses both instruments and find the opposite: single-instrument regulation is effective because the instruments are strategic complements, and regulating either instrument curbs the other. We also find that the two instruments achieve what monopolization achieves, higher prices and reduced consumer welfare, while passing every conventional antitrust test.

ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)@arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · 14h ago

arXiv📈🤖 Rebuilding Startups: An Empirical Study on Remote Work and Skill Complementarity By Lei, Chen, Wen et al

Remote work is a common practice of workplace flexibility enabled by digital infrastructure, yet its implications for firms' talent composition and organizational structure remain underexplored. This question is especially important for startups, which often operate with constraints in accessing talent through local labor markets. We focus on skill complementarity, a dimension of talent composition that is critical to startups' early-stage development. By integrating LinkedIn job postings, worker skills, and worker mobility data, we study the impact of remote work on skill complementarity in startups. We find that higher remote work intensity increases firm-level skill complementarity, primarily by helping startups recruit new workers whose skills better match the firms' hiring needs and diversify from the skill sets of existing employees. We further show that this shift in workforce composition carries organizational consequences: remote work is associated with greater organizational hierarchy through increased skill complementarity. These findings suggest that, for startups, remote work is not merely a flexibility policy but a hiring mechanism that helps young firms assemble complementary talent despite resource constraints. At the same time, this may push startups toward more hierarchical structures, which serve as formalized coordination mechanisms to effectively achieve the value of a more complementary workforce.

ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)@arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · 14h ago

arXiv📈🤖 Delegated Monitoring in Public-Private Sector Credit Programs: Underinvestment, Overinvestment, and the Design of Subsidized Lending By Charles-Cadogan

This paper studies public-private partnerships that delegate access-to-credit programs to private equity and venture-capital intermediaries. The public sector seeks to relax credit rationing and expand lending to socially valuable firms, while delegated monitors screen applicants, allocate subsidized loans, and bear agency costs. The paper develops a mechanism-design model showing that the same delegated intermediation structure can generate both Stiglitz-Weiss underinvestment and De Meza-Webb overinvestment distortions. When screening is imperfect, interest-rate sorting may exclude creditworthy target firms. When subsidies weaken monitoring and repayment incentives, high-risk firms may obtain excessive credit. The operative distortion is determined by monitoring curvature and subsidy intensity. The model further predicts that the feasible spread between loan contracts narrows as expected risk increases. A sequential extension incorporates credit scoring and Bayesian updating, showing that welfare loss from misclassification is minimized when monitoring resources are allocated according to the marginal effect of borrower characteristics on posterior risk classification. Because granular borrower-level data are unavailable, the empirical component provides descriptive state-year evidence from SBA SBIC reports (2018-2025) and a calibrated simulation illustrating that the model's comparative statics are empirically recoverable. The empirical analysis is presented as design validation rather than as a causal test.

ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)@arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · 19h ago

arXiv📈🤖 Modern extreme value statistics for Utopian extremes By

Capturing the extremal behaviour of data often requires bespoke marginal and
dependence models which are grounded in rigorous asymptotic theory, and hence
provide reliable extrapolation into the upper tails of the data-generating
distribution. We present a modern toolbox of four methodological frameworks,
motivated by modern extreme value theory, that can be used to accurately
estimate extreme exceedance probabilities or the corresponding level in either
a univariate or multivariate setting. Our frameworks were used to facilitate
the winning contribution of Team Yalla to the data competition organised for
the 13th International Conference on Extreme Value Analysis (EVA2023). This
competition comprised seven teams competing across four separate
sub-challenges, with each requiring the modelling of data simulated from known,
yet highly complex, statistical distributions, and extrapolation far beyond the
range of the available samples in order to predict probabilities of extreme
events. Data were constructed to be representative of real environmental data,
sampled from the fantasy country of "Utopia".

ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)@arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · 21h ago

arXiv📈🤖 Optimal Functional Bilinear Regression with Two-way Functional Covariates via Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space By

Traditional functional linear regression usually takes a one-dimensional
functional predictor as input and estimates the continuous coefficient
function. Modern applications often generate two-dimensional covariates, which
become matrices when observed at grid points. To avoid the inefficiency of the
classical method involving estimation of a two-dimensional coefficient
function, we propose a functional bilinear regression model, and introduce an
innovative three-term penalty to impose roughness penalty in the estimation.
The proposed estimator exhibits minimax optimal property for prediction under
the framework of reproducing kernel Hilbert space. An iterative generalized
cross-validation approach is developed to choose tuning parameters, which
significantly improves the computational efficiency over the traditional
cross-validation approach. The statistical and computational advantages of the
proposed method over existing methods are further demonstrated via simulated
experiments, the Canadian weather data, and a biochemical long-range infrared
light detection and ranging data.

ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)@arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · 24h ago

arXiv📈🤖 Asymptotically-exact selective inference for quantile regression By

arXiv:2404.03059v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: When analyzing large datasets, it is common to select a model prior to making inferences. For reliable inferences, it is important to make adjustments that account for the model selection process, resulting in selective inferences. Our paper introduces an asymptotic pivot to infer about the effects of selected variables on conditional quantile functions. Utilizing estimators from smoothed quantile regression, our proposed pivot is easy to compute and ensures asymptotically-exact selective inferences without making strict distributional assumptions about the response variable. At the core of the pivot is the use of external randomization, which enables us to utilize the full sample for both selection and inference without the need to partition the data into independent data subsets or discard data at either step. On simulated data, we find that: (i) the asymptotic confidence intervals based on our pivot achieve the desired coverage rates, even in cases where sample splitting fails due to insufficient sample size for inference; (ii) our intervals are consistently shorter than those produced by sample splitting across various models and signal settings. We report similar findings when we apply our approach to study risk factors for low birth weights in a publicly accessible dataset of US birth records from 2022.

ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)@arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · yesterday

arXiv📈🤖 Group Selection as a Safeguard Against AI Substitution By Zhong, Eisenmann, Garcia et al

Reliance on generative AI can reduce cultural variance and diversity, especially in creative work. This reduction in variance has already led to problems in model performance, including model collapse and hallucination. In this paper, we examine the long-term consequences of AI use for human cultural evolution and the conditions under which widespread AI use may lead to "cultural collapse", a process in which reliance on AI-generated content reduces human variation and innovation and slows cumulative cultural evolution. Using an agent-based model and evolutionary game theory, we compare two types of AI use: complement and substitute. AI-complement users seek suggestions and guidance while remaining the main producers of the final output, whereas AI-substitute users provide minimal input, and rely on AI to produce most of the output. We then study how these use strategies compete and spread under evolutionary dynamics. We find that AI-substitute users prevail under individual-level selection despite the stronger reduction in cultural variance. By contrast, AI-complement users can benefit their groups by maintaining the variance needed for exploration, and can therefore be favored under cultural group selection when group boundaries are strong. Overall, our findings shed light on the long-term, population-level effects of AI adoption and inform policy and organizational strategies to mitigate these risks.

ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)@arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · yesterday

arXiv📈🤖 The Breadth Premium: Measuring the Firm-level Impact of CEO Career Breadth By Puutio

Prevailing career and education systems continue to reward early specialization and deep expertise within narrow domains. While such depth promotes efficiency, it may also limit adaptability in complex and rapidly changing environments. Building on research showing that variability in training inputs enhances learning outcomes across cognitive and behavioral domains, this study explores whether the same principle applies to executive performance.
These early findings suggest that leadership breadth, defined as experience spanning multiple functions, disciplines, and sectors, is positively associated with firm-level performance. While the dataset remains under validation, the pattern observed supports the emerging view that as specialization deepens, the marginal value of lateral insight rises. Breadth, in this light, functions as a form of adaptive capital; it enhances leaders' capacity for integrative reasoning, organizational translation, and strategic flexibility in uncertain environments.

ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)@arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · yesterday

arXiv📈🤖 Stabilizing Welfare-Maximizing Decisions via Endogenous Transfers By Kavner

Many multi-agent systems depend on collective decisions made by self-interested agents, which raises deep questions about coalition formation and stability. We study social choice with endogenous, outcome-contingent transfers, where agents voluntarily form contracts that redistribute utility depending on the collective decision, allowing for fully strategic coalition formation. We show that under consensus rules, individually rational strong Nash equilibria (IR-SNE) always exist, implementing welfare-maximizing outcomes with feasible transfers, and provide a simple, efficient algorithm to construct them. For more general anonymous, monotonic, and resolute rules, we identify necessary conditions for viable deviations, significantly limiting the possibility of destabilizing coalitions. By bridging cooperative and noncooperative perspectives, our approach shows that transferable utility can achieve core-like stability, restoring efficiency and budget balance even where classical impossibility results generally apply. Overall, this framework offers a practical and robust way to coordinate large-scale strategic multi-agent systems.

ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)@arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · yesterday

arXiv📈🤖 Analysis of Stakeholder Involvement in Nuclear Power Plant Cost Overruns and Implications for Contract Structuring By Forsyth, Larsen, Spangler et al

Existing evidence on nuclear power plant construction suggests that individual stakeholders involved in project delivery are often not responsible for all of the cost overruns in their scope of the project, which can lead to costly and time-consuming litigation to determine who is truly at fault for overruns. This study introduces a framework to model the share of overruns caused and received as payment by five stakeholders in a nuclear construction project: equipment suppliers, construction subcontractors, the design and management team, creditors, and the nuclear regulator. We then perform a contract analysis under three common contract structures - fixed-price, cost-plus, and performance-based - to show the profit misallocations that can result, revealing the advantages and disadvantages of each contract type for aligning stakeholder incentives. Regardless of the contract type chosen, strong owner involvement is crucial for project success, and we conclude with specific recommendations for project owners seeking to minimize cost overruns.

ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)@arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · yesterday

arXiv📈🤖 Private From Whom? Minimal Information Leakage in Auctions By Gao, Tang

In many auctions, bidders may value keeping their private information hidden from the auctioneer or other bidders. Yet information must be conveyed to conduct an auction. Among deterministic bilateral communication protocols, revealing less information to bidders requires revealing more information to the auctioneer, and vice versa. A protocol implementing a given social choice rule is on the Privacy Frontier if no alternative protocol reveals less to both bidders and the auctioneer. For first-price auctions, the descending protocol and the sealed-bid protocol are on the Privacy Frontier. For second-price auctions, the ascending protocol and the ascending-join protocol are on the Privacy Frontier, but the sealed-bid protocol is not. We provide sufficient conditions for a protocol to be on the Privacy Frontier and devise alternative protocols allowing a designer to flexibly balance different dimensions of privacy.

ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH)@arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · yesterday

arXiv📈🤖 Learning to Unlearn: Education as a Remedy for Misspecified Beliefs By Fedyaeva, Lukyanov, Tolli\'e