ALEXANDER WOLITZKY [email protected]

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

OFFICE CONTACT INFORMATION HOME CONTACT INFORMATION MIT Department of Economics 548 Lowell Mail Ctr 50 Memorial Drive, E52-391 10 Holyoke Pl Cambridge, MA 02142-1347 Cambridge, MA 02138 201-274-4246 Mobile: 201-274-4246 [email protected] http://econ-www.mit.edu/grad/wolitzky

MIT PLACEMENT OFFICER MIT PLACEMENT ADMINISTRATOR Professor Nancy L. Rose [email protected] Mr. Peter Hoagland [email protected] 617-253-8956 617-253-8787

DOCTORAL Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) STUDIES: PhD, Economics, Expected completion June 2011 DISSERTATION: “Essays on Dynamic Games”

DISSERTATION COMMITTEE AND REFERENCES Professor Glenn Ellison Professor Daron Acemoglu MIT Department of Economics MIT Department of Economics 50 Memorial Drive, E52-380A 50 Memorial Drive, E52-380B Cambridge, MA 02142-1347 Cambridge, MA 02142-1347 617-253-8702 617-253-1927 [email protected] [email protected] Professor Muhamet Yildiz MIT Department of Economics 50 Memorial Drive, E52-357 Cambridge, MA 02142-1347 617-253-5331 [email protected]

PRIOR A.B., summa cum laude Economics and Mathematics Harvard University 2007 EDUCATION

CITIZENSHIP USA GENDER: Male YEAR OF BIRTH 1985

RESEARCH & Primary Field: Theory TEACHING Secondary Fields: Political Economy, Industrial Organization FIELDS

TEACHING Microeconomic Theory III (graduate, MIT Course 14.123), Spring 2011 EXPERIENCE Teaching Assistant to Professor Muhamet Yildiz Microeconomic Theory IV (graduate, MIT Course 14.124), Spring 2011 Teaching Assistant to Professor Matthias Dewatripont Principles of Economics: Microeconomics (undergraduate, Harvard Summer 2006 Summer School Course ECON S-10a), Teaching Assistant to Professor Hossein Kazemi

RELEVANT Resident Tutor in Economics, Lowell House, Harvard University 2009 - 2011 POSITIONS Research Assistant to Professor Daron Acemoglu 2009 Research Assistant to Professor Glenn Ellison 2008 Research Assistant to Professor Robert Gibbons 2007

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Research Assistant to Professor Kenneth Rogoff 2004 - 2005

FELLOWSHIPS, Institute for Humane Studies Fellowship (2010-2011) HONORS, AND Kenan Sahin Presidential Graduate Fellowship (2007-2008) AWARDS National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (2007-2010) Williams Prize (best overall record in economics in Harvard College) (2007) Harris Prize (best senior thesis in economics in Harvard College) (2007) Hoopes Prize (one of the best senior theses in Harvard College) (2007)

PROFESSIONAL Referee for: Review of Economic Studies; Journal of Law, Economics, and ACTIVITIES Organization; Review of Economic Design Presentations and Invited Conferences: International Industrial Organization Conference (Boston, April 2009) CSIC Conference on Determinants of Social Conflict (Madrid, January 2010) Stanford/UWI/CaPRI Political Economy Conference (Kingston, February 2010) 21st International Conference on (Stony Brook, July 2010) Sackler National Academy of Science Conference on the Dynamics of Social, Political, and Economic Institutions (Irvine, December 2010)

PUBLICATIONS: “The Economics of Labor Coercion,” Econometrica, Forthcoming (joint with Daron Acemoglu). Throughout history and in many developing countries today, many labor transactions are “coercive,” in the sense that force or the threat of force plays a central role in convincing workers to accept employment or its terms. We propose a tractable principal-agent model of coercion, based on the idea that coercive activities by employers affect the participation constraint of workers. We show that coercion and effort are complementary, so that coercion increases effort. However, coercion always reduces utilitarian social welfare. Better outside options for workers reduce coercion, but greater demand for labor increases coercion. We then embed the (coercive) principal-agent model in general equilibrium, and study when and how labor scarcity encourages coercion. General equilibrium interactions working through the price of output lead to a positive relationship between labor scarcity and coercion, while those working through the outside option lead to a negative relationship. In addition, markets in slaves make slaves worse off, conditional on enslavement, and coercion is more viable in industries that do not require relationship-specific investment by workers.

“Dynamic Monopoly with Relational Incentives,” Theoretical Economics, 2010, Vol. 5, 479-518. A monopoly seller often has the option of failing to deliver a good (or of delivering a good of substandard quality) after receiving payment. The monopoly may be induced to deliver the (quality) good if consumers expect that the monopoly will not deliver in the future if it does not deliver today. If the good is non-durable and consumers are anonymous, the monopoly's optimal is to set price equal to the static monopoly price each period if the discount factor is high enough, and otherwise to set the lowest price at which it can credibly promise to deliver the good. If the good is durable, an intuitive lower bound on the monopoly's optimal profit is derived for any discount factor, which converges to the optimal static monopoly profit as the discount factor converges to one, in contrast to the Coase conjecture.

“Fully Sincere Voting,” Games and Economic Behavior, 2009, Vol. 67, 720-735. In a general social choice framework where the requirement of strategy-proofness may not be sensible, a social choice rule is called fully sincere if it never gives any

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individual an incentive to vote for a less-preferred alternative over a more-preferred one, and provides an incentive to vote for an alternative if and only if it is preferred to the default option that would result from abstaining. It is shown that fully sincere social choice rules are convex combinations of the rule that chooses each alternative with probability equal to the proportion of the vote it receives and an arbitrary rule that ignores voters' preferences. The natural probabilistic analog of approval voting is the fully sincere rule that allows voters maximal flexibility in expressing their preferences and gives these preferences maximal weight.

RESEARCH “Reputational Bargaining under Knowledge of Rationality” (Job Market Paper) PAPERS: Two players announce bargaining postures to which they may become committed and then bargain over the division of a surplus. The share of the surplus that a player can guarantee herself under first-order knowledge of rationality is determined (as a function of her probability of becoming committed), as is the bargaining posture that she must announce in order to guarantee herself this much. This “maxmin” share of the surplus is large relative to the probability of becoming committed (e.g., it equals 30% if the commitment probability is 1 in 10, and equals 5% if the commitment probability is 1 in 1 billion), and the corresponding bargaining posture simply demands this share plus compensation for any delay in reaching agreement. The paper also considers whether a larger share can be guaranteed if there is higher-order knowledge of rationality, and relates the of the model to the outcomes of a broad class of discrete-time bargaining procedures with frequent offers.

“Repeated Public Good Provision,” Revision Requested by Review of Economic Studies This paper studies the effects of group size and structure on the maximum level of a public good that can be provided in in repeated games. Monitoring is assumed to be private and all-or-nothing, in that in every period player i either perfectly observes player j's contribution to the public good or gets no information about player j's contribution. This class of games generalizes both random matching and monitoring on networks. The main result is that the maximum level of public good provision can be sustained in grim trigger strategies. If all players are “equally observable,” comparative statics on the maximum per capita level of public good provision depend on the monitoring technology only through a simple statistic: its effective contagiousness. Under broad conditions, making monitoring less uncertain in the second-order stochastic dominance sense increases public good provision. For games played on asymmetric social networks, a new notion of network centrality is introduced, under which more central players make larger contributions; in addition, all players in better connected networks can contribute more to the public good.

“Indeterminacy of Reputation Effects in Repeated Games with Contracts,” Revised and Resubmitted to Games and Economic Behavior This paper studies whether allowing players to sign binding contracts governing future play leads to reputation effects in repeated games with long-run players. The analysis of Abreu and Pearce (2007) is extended by allowing for the possibility that different behavioral types may not be immediately distinguishable from each other. Given any prior over behavioral types, a modified prior is constructed with the same total weight on behavioral types and a larger support under which almost all efficient, feasible, and individually rational payoffs are attainable in perfect Bayesian equilibrium. Thus, whether reputation effects emerge in repeated games with contracts depends on details of the prior distribution over behavioral types other than its support.

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“A Search Cost Model of Obfuscation,” Revision Requested by RAND Journal of Economics (joint with Glenn Ellison) In industries from finance to online retail, firms appear to withhold relevant price information from consumers. This paper develops search-theoretic models in which it is individually rational for firms to engage in obfuscation. It considers oligopoly competition between firms selling a homogeneous good to a population of rational consumers who incur search costs to learn each firm's price. Search costs are endogenized: obfuscation is equated with unobservable actions that make it more time-consuming to inspect a product and learn its price. If search costs are even slightly convex in time spent searching, obfuscation has a dramatic effect on the set of equilibrium price distributions. The paper also examines the consequences of changes in consumer search costs, as well as the cross-sectional relationship between prices and obfuscation.

“Career Concerns and Performance Reporting in Optimal Incentive Contracts” A principal-agent model is analyzed in which the principal sends a nonverifiable report of output to a competitive labor market interested in the agent's ability. When the principal can offer any contract to the agent, the principal's report cannot influence the market's valuation of the agent in equilibrium. In the presence of a limited liability constraint, the principal's report can influence the market's valuation of the agent, but only by partitioning outputs into two classes. In such an informative equilibrium, the principal is always better off than in a babbling equilibrium, and may even be better off than in any equilibrium without the limited liability constraint.