I've been working on a new tool, Refine, to make scholars more productive. If you're interested in being among the very first to try the beta, please read on. Refine leverages the best current AI models to draw your attention to potential errors and clarity issues in research paper drafts. 1/

Using time series graphs to make causal claims be like

Delighted (and honestly a little bit stunned) that our paper “Swap Regret and Correlated Equilibria Beyond Normal-Form Games” was just awarded both the “Best Paper” and “Best Student Paper” at EC! arxiv.org/abs/2502.20229

Reminder that N player zero-sum games can represent arbitrary (N-1) player games, by the use of a dummy player.

With rent control in the news, it’s a good moment to recall the research of @rebeccadiamond.bsky.social and co-authors. They show that strict rent control in San Francisco reduced the availability of rental housing, eventually *raising* rental costs. doi.org/10.1257/aer....

Evicting NSF from their building in Washington is pretty revealing. But if they auction off its History Wall, I know which tile I’d bid on. Here’s the list to choose from… marketdesigner.blogspot.com/2025/06/evic...

A New Pyramid-Like Shape Always Lands the Same Side Up. A tetrahedron is the simplest Platonic solid. Mathematicians have now made one that’s stable only on one side, confirming a decades-old conjecture. www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-pyrami...

If AI can't kill radiologists' careers, can it really kill anyone's? www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/t...

What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders? If two people have the same priors, and their posteriors for an event A are common knowledge, then those posteriors are equal.

Re-upping my advice about how to write a good title and abstract for an academic paper, appropriately called: "How to Write a Title and Abstract" Feel free to share this thread, which will focus on titles. #EconSky #AcademicSky

Jason Hartline likes cocktails with lemon juice.

New working paper alert: we provide a model of post-hoc rationalizations, driven by motives of (self-)esteem. We show how this can lead to groupthink, polarization, and a preference for echo chambers. www.ifo.de/sites/defaul...

Our policy is already too long to cover all possible scenarios, I am told (repeatedly...), but it is very clear "access to the data and code is nonexclusive to the authors" in line 1 ... www.aeaweb.org/journals/dat... Need an exception? See line 3, and a discussion w/ editor + me ensues.

Maybe journals should have a policy that data from anonymous sources will be verified by the journal before publication. The editor could contact the firm, to verify that it exists and that the study was conducted as stated. @aeadata.bsky.social is this feasible or am I missing something?

In hindsight, if a major material science firm had found a way to make its best material scientists 80% better, there’s no way it would stay anonymous. It would shout it from the rooftops, and put it in its earnings call. This is an argument that should have occurred to economists.

Wow, nothing beats making that one conjecture that turns the idea into a paper, and then proving it. Never gets old.

The Chicago Pope implies the existence of a New Keynesian Pope and a Behavioral Pope

Modeling the conclave? You’ll need cardinal utilities

Singapore ministers defend meals taken with money launderer. The perils of zero accountability.

Congrats to Sergiu Hart, perhaps the quickest thinker I know, and a wonderful mentor, coauthor, and person, for being elected as an International Member of the National Academy of Sciences! www.nasonline.org/news/2025-na...

Remember when you first learned about genetics at school? All those fascinating examples of human traits that are each apparently determined by just a single gene? Time to check in on some of your favourites to see how they’re doing. 🧬🧵🧪 1/n

Power corrupts. It’s time for Singapore to become a democracy.

💡 Open science: A team of researchers at Shandong University has attempted to replicate Oprea (2024 AER). The results do not replicate. Oprea 2024 reported an online lab experiment, and found that prospect theory anomalies occur not only for lotteries, but also for deterministic 'mirrors'.

My paper on algorithmic pricing, joint with In-Koo Cho, is now online at the Journal of Economic Theory. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The Prime Minister faced yet another setback this week as the ongoing scandal over two-way fixed effects produced two more estimators for Canadians to learn. ‘You’re telling me these regressions produced negative weights and the Liberals knew nothing?!” the Conservative Party leader tweeted Sunday

I need the “Campaign in prose. Govern in econometrics.” t-shirt.

you daily "supply network formation and fragility" tweet

@lastpositivist.bsky.social Have you considered writing for a broader audience?

randomization aka let god pick directly

Economic theory to the rescue.

--Development of Backward Induction-- 🧵 Here's a summary of my 10+ years of interest in, and conversations/exchanges with many colleagues, backward induction & its origins. I haven't finished this yet, but just went through all my exchanges & put this together before it becomes harder to do so.

A stock market, if you can keep it.

With all respect to the sanguine predictions from fellow economists: Standard quantitative trade models don’t seem to capture the loss of global public goods, such as the rules-based international order.

Magisterial. #econsky #experiments marketdesigner.blogspot.com/2025/04/a-us...

If you’re a Boston-area grad student interested in behavioral economics meets computer science, come to this workshop on April 4. urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=htt...

Please join us for our inaugural BEACH Day: a workshop from the Boston Economics and Computing Hub. On What: Behavioral Models in EconCS When: Friday April 4, 2025 Where: BU CDS @bucds.bsky.social Registration: Free-but-required (forms.gle/ZkB3qVMqQYjA...) by March 28. Schedule: In-progress below!

Last year @shengwuli.bsky.social pointed out that the core tenet of my minimalist market design framework—"Don't fix what's not broken"—echoes Chesterton’s Fence (now discussed in Section 2.2.2). In an age of Trumpian & DOGE policies, this tenet feels especially relevant. arxiv.org/pdf/2401.00307

This looks like important work, and it’s going on my reading list.

Everybody wants to talk "game theory" nobody wants to write extensive forms

This is what competitive authoritarianism looks like - using the criminal investigations by the law enforcement apparatus to pursue partisan ends.

Autocrats undermined democracy in Hungary, Russia, and Singapore. It can happen here.

Emphasizing again that anyone who responds to "that's illegal" with some variant of "lol all law is meaningless you're a sucker for thinking that matters" is actively doing PR for Trump and helping him. Nihilism about the law is the best way to make sure that the rule of law dies a quicker death.

Data availability enables us to catch fraud. 🔎 See: Recent sleuthing by Data Colada and the Institute for Replication.

After being alerted about possible misconduct, the I4R are reproducing published papers that use data from a specific NGO (GDRI). This thread releases the first 2 reports and provides more information about the work and responses/statements from authors journals and journals. 🧵

Authoritarian states such as Singapore often launch abusive prosecutions against opposition politicians.

As a political scientist who studies countries that managed to stop the slide into authoritarianism, I can assure you that ***refraining from provoking the authoritarian*** is not how it works. Without further ado, I will now go tear out another chunk of hair.

It’s so important for people to realize that authoritarianism in America will look like this, not like a police state with martial law and people disappearing into prisons. It will be a dispirited opposition that people are afraid of supporting, bc otherwise they’ll get in trouble.

The resignation letter by the 38-year-old lead federal prosecutor in the Eric Adams corruption case, and who he is. We are in a character-testing time. Hagan Scotten just passed his with high honors. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/n...

AUSA Hagan Scotten, former clerk for John Roberts, really put some mustard on his resignation letter.