Alistair Wilson

Doctoral Candidate

New York University
Department of Economics
19 W. 4th Street, 6th Floor
New York, NY 10012
email: alistair at nyu dot edu

Fields:

Expected Graduation Date:

Working Papers:

A Field Study on Matching with Network Externalities (Submitted)

We study the effects of network externalities on a unique matching protocol for faculty in a large U.S. professional school to offices in a new building. We collected institutional, web, and survey data on faculty's attributes and choices. We first identify the different layers of the social network: institutional affiliation, coauthorships, and friendships. We demonstrate and quantify the effects of network externalities on choices and outcomes. Furthermore, we disentangle the different layers of the social network and quantify their relative impact. Finally, we assess the matching protocol from a welfare perspective. Our study suggests the importance and feasibility of accounting for network externalities in general assignment problems and evaluates a set of techniques that can be employed to this end.

Link

Costly Communication

I develop a novel model of team/committee decision making in which communication is costly in two directions: agents must pay costs to send messages to one another, but also to receive the messages sent by others. Agents are heterogeneous only in the quality of the information they possess, and preferences are directly aligned over the outcomes. Equilibrium strategies are intuitively characterized by a double cutoff: a confidence-level above which to speak, and a confidence-level below which to listen. However, free-riding on the messages of others leads to less sending and listening than the optimal level. The model is implemented in the laboratory and the decisions of subjects contrasted with the theoretical predictions of the model. In particular, the theoretical and behavioral differences between high-sending, low-reception cost environments and low-sending, high-reception cost are compared.

Paper coming soon.

Work in Progress:

An Experimental Study of Matching Mechanisms