Excited to moderate this panel on "AI Acquihires: Competition Risks, Talent Battles and Economic Spillovers" with the antitrust all-star team of Kanter, Garicano, Marinescu, Letina, and Zenger. Wednesday, 8 October 2025 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM (ET) Registration: cepr-org.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Very happy to see two of my papers cited in the recent CMA report on "Investment and competition over the business lifecycle." The report provides an excellent overview of the literature. Thanks to @jschneebacher.bsky.social and coauthors for preparing it!

A new article in the WSJ on reverse acquihires. The main point it makes is that one group that loses out in a reverse acquihire are the employees who are left behind. This will make it more difficult for future startups to attract employees. www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-r...

A person sends you an e-mail and you notice that it was written by chatgpt. How do you react? I don't know why, but I tend to have an instinctive negative reaction to it.

A thread on "reverse acquihires" in the AI space. Reverse acquihires are characterized by two things: 1) the buyer takes over the most important/talented employees and 2) the buyer pays a hefty sum to the target firm via a side deal. They are becoming common in the AI space:

One thing I have not seen mentioned in the discussion about compensation packages for AI engineers is that firms are willing to pay not just for what value those employees bring to them, but also for the value that their competitors lose. In a sense, firms are partly trying to *hoard AI talent* 1/2

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/

Gems you find while reading about past inducement prizes/innovation contests: in 1936, Polish mathematician Stanisław Mazur offered a live goose to whoever solved one mathematical problem involving Banach spaces. 37 years later, Swedish mathematician Per Enflo got the goose.

PSA: The special topic of this year's South Carolina Game Theory Conference is *Advances in Contest Theory*. The conference takes place on August 6-7, 2025 and the application deadline is May 16, 2025. Link: sites.google.com/view/thescgt...

I have a postdoc position in Behavioral/Experimental Economics available for 6 years, at the oldest university in Germany in beautiful Heidelberg. Please forward to anyone who might be interested! #EconJobs #AcademicJobs #HigherEd #Economics #JobAlert

One of the best conferences for those working on contests is going to Australia this year! Submission deadline is June 1, 2025 and more info can be found here: www.rmit.edu.au/about/school...

Hey, Jon Stewart, uncalled-for!

So it seems that my colleague Jean-Michel Benkert is too modest to mention it himself, but I think it is a great thing that he has accepted to be an arXiv moderator for economics. Thanks for providing the public good, @jmbenkert.bsky.social!

Letzten Monat hielt Edward Glaeser an der Universität Bern einen Vortrag zum Thema «Cities and Infrastructure». Dieses Interview mit ihm erörtert die wichtigsten Themen seines Vortrags. www.derbund.ch/uni-bern-us-...

Planning your 2025 economics conference schedule? I've updated my list of general interest, IO, and theory conferences: www.igorletina.com/conferences.... New this year: you can generate a calendar file 📅 to easily track dates and submission deadlines of selected conferences. #econsky

The deadline for applications is January 31, 2025.

👇👇👇

So, I'm pretty sure this means that Sauron is back.

My first year as a Vice President of the Swiss Competition Commission is ending, and I thought this was a good opportunity to look back on the decisions that I've spent the most time thinking about. Four stand out:

1/7 In our new WP Strategic Attribute Learning, Ludmila Matysková, Egor Starkov, and I study how preference misalignment between a researcher and a decision-maker shapes learning and decision-making. [Link below]

The recent blind hostility towards the use of AI in learning reminds me SO MUCH of the discussions around the use of Wikipedia from the time when I was a student. www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/01...

How big is the cold-start problem on Airbnb? Pretty big! Lowering the price of new listings relative to incumbent ones would lead to a welfare increase of more than 8% of total host revenue, mostly benefitting consumers. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Innovation job market papers round up! Over the last week, I found 50+ papers from PhDs going on the job market and I’ll post a few abstracts to this thread every day until they’re all up.

Calling all PhD students interested in innovation -- Submit your work to the 8th Annual Wharton Innovation Doctoral Symposium; highly recommended! mackinstitute.wharton.upenn.edu/students/wha...

1/ New (short!) paper with @jmbenkert.bsky.social. The question that we are interested in is this: when should you stop searching for an innovation? Surprisingly (to us) the answer in our model is: never. Link to the paper: arxiv.org/abs/2412.03227

arXiv is, imo, the best place for publishing working papers and we should recognize the work that volunteers do to provide this public good to us. Here is the list of current arXiv moderators for economics:

New paper and online presentation #EconSky “Content Moderation for Sale: Pricing Attention through Steering and Certification” with the fantastic Rahul Deb and Matt Mitchell TLDR haiku: Certify poorly, so you can sell more to bots? Attention matters 1/8

I just spent 20 minutes on Google/Bing/DuckDuckGo trying to find out what is the newsstand price of The Economist. Without success. Can it be this difficult to find such trivial information online?

#bankrun prevention in #Greece

#econsky, here is an interesting-looking conference for PhD students: wzb.eu/en/events/1s...

Love this paper!

I am teaching a class tomorrow on competition and algorithms. This is the slide I am opening with.

Key reminder: even if high rents are partly driven by supply & demand, it doesn’t make it fine for landlords & software companies like RealPage to use anticompetitive algorithms to further increase rent. #antitrust

Giving a talk in a place where you were a student is such a strange experience. Some 13 years later, the exam anxiety still hits hard! (The seminar experience was wonderful though -- so many great and kind people at Bocconi!)

Here's Bryan Caplan writing about math in economics. Seems very wrong to me. I wonder what the quickest refutation is that would make sense to most practicing economists. www.betonit.ai/p/economath_...

I have missed threads like this one SO MUCH!

Suppose you didn't know who won the election. Two options: (i) I tell you whether it was Trump, or it was Harris, (ii) I don't tell you the winner, but I tell you who won Michigan. According to the rational inattention literature, (ii) has better chances of catching your attention than (i).

That concludes our two-day Market Power workshop on Camille Jordan, Columbian hydropower and many equilibrium Constellations.

Algorithms can collude without threats and while playing best response. This makes it challenging to clearly define algorithmic collusion. #EconSky #antitrust

It’s amazing how editorial processes have changed. #econsky At the EJ I now get nervous enquiries after 2 1/2 months and our average response time for full reviews is well below 100 days. I was used to six months +.

Do we do threads🧵on #EconSky? I recently gave a talk on competition policy and startup acquisitions. Here are the main points: 1/ Since ~2001, acquisitions have overtaken IPOs as the primary "exit" for VC-backed startups. This shift impacts how competition plays out.

In what is clearly an example of insufficient collusion, there are three (!) separate workshops on market power this Thursday/Friday. 1/5

I am trying to be more active on here, and have not yet seen an IO or org econ starter pack, so here is an attempt at one: go.bsky.app/Rchu8QX Please shout out if I have forgotten someone, or when others join. #EconSky

I did this go.bsky.app/HbG7d92 But by now, there are probably many more people to add.

I am looking for a 6 year Postdoc in Micro, preferably Theory at Freie Universität Berlin! fu-berlin.de/universitaet... Please apply through the Berlin School of Economics, berlinschoolofeconomics.de/programs/res... Berlin offers a vibrant, fun and super collegial community! Join us! #econsky 📈📉

Really, really excited about this: Prof. Edward Glaeser (Harvard University) will deliver a *public* lecture on "Cities and Infrastructure" at the University of Bern this December. The event is open to the public, you just have to register: www.vwi.unibe.ch/ueber_uns/an...

A postdoc position at the University of Bern:

Brussels seeks powers to block ‘killer acquisitions’ in Europe and beyond www.ft.com/content/292f...

For IO economists: both MaCCI and CRESSE sent out their call for papers today.

How does the Nobel prize committee get the phone numbers of the winners?