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    • Jonathan A. Libgober

      Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Southern California

      Welcome to my website!

       

      I am an economist studying information economics and mechanism design. I am interested in both pure theory and applied questions.

       

      I received my PhD in Economics from Harvard in May 2018. I have been at USC since the start of 2019.

       

      References:

      Drew Fudenberg, Eric Maskin, Jerry Green, Ben Golub

    • Download CV

      Contact me for more info. (Last update: March 29, 2019)

    • About Me

      Information Economics, Pure and Applied

      I am a theorist who settings where the acquisition, transmission or dynamics of information play a major role. I am particularly interested in questions related to the design of optimal policies in these situations.

       

      I have studied pricing with consumer learning, researcher incentives, and biases in dynamic belief updating.

    • Working Papers

      Informational Robustness in Intertemporal Pricing

      with Xiaosheng Mu (January 2019) R&R @ Review of Economic Studies

      Constant price paths deliver the optimal profit guarantee when a seller does not know how buyers learn about a product.

      False Positives and Transparency

      (July 2019)

      Lack of transparency over research methods can induce biased claims. But it also creates an incentive to counteract the de-biasing of that research.

      Prototyping under Competition

      Available upon request; to be posted soon

      A principal wants to choose a project and allocate it competitively. In some cases, the ability to randomize across participants (but not across projects) is necessary for competition to be beneficial.

    • Works In Progress

      Email me if you have any questions

      Contracting with Experiment Choice: Interpreting Failure

      A principal hires an agent to develop a new technology. The uncertainty about the productivity of the relationship creates a novel incentive conflict: the agent may prefer to keep changing projects in case failure causes the principal to become pessimistic too early.

      The Informed Principal with Evolving Private Information

      A principal with a privately observed state designs a mechanism facing an agent with serial correlation. The interaction of the principal's and the agent's private information yields distortions away from first best, and in certain settings both are necessary.

    • Education

      Harvard University

      Ph.D. (2012-2018)

      Thesis Title: Information and Learning in Mechanism Design

       

      M.A. awarded 2014, field exams in Microeconomic Theory and Industrial Organization

      University of Chicago

      Undergraduate (2008-2012)

      S.B. in Mathematics (Departmental Honors, Paul R. Cohen award for top 5 record among seniors)

      A.B. in Economics (Departmental Honors, David S. Hu award for coursework and thesis)

      A.B. in Statistics

      Phi Beta Kappa

    © 2019