Posted on Fri 15 May 2026 in Research • Tagged with entrepreneurship, pivot, optimism
As an academic, at least for me, getting a paper rejected at a journal is nothing new. Whenever a paper is rejected, the same fundamental question needs to answered: rework the paper and try again at different journal, or to abandon it altogether, pivot, and work on some new project …
Posted on Tue 16 July 2024 in Research • Tagged with dynamic programming, noisy evaluation, testing mode
Testing many alternatives, with the goal of identifying a single best alternative, can proceed in one of two ways: (i) parallel - where the agent decides on the number of alternatives to examine, and after examining them selects the one that yielded the highest value, or (ii) sequential - where the agent …
Posted on Tue 28 May 2024 in Research • Tagged with spillovers, estimation
One my coauthors, Xiaofeng Liu, and I were interested in understanding spillovers on contest platforms. While a theoretical model helped us ground the predictions, the actual empirical test turned out to be tricky to reason about (at least for me). Specifically, it turns out that the model predicts that the …
Posted on Mon 18 March 2024 in Research • Tagged with quantal choice, commitment, flexibility, noisy decisions
Firms employ stage-gates where information is evaluated before deciding to continue resource commitment toward a project. This approach, wherein investments are not fully ex-ante allocated, has the benefit of being more flexible and deferring resource commitments till better information is available. Still, does such flexibility come at a cost? One …