I investigate three goals of school choice: student welfare, encouraging neighborhood schools, and diversity. I develop a framework for finding the optimal match for any combination of these objectives while respecting stability and incentive compatibility. I then apply my framework to data from...

We study a structural model of college admissions framed as a contest between a continuum of students for enrollment in a continuum of colleges where the contest outcome is decided by the students' choice of human capital (HC). Students have private information about their learning costs, and...

We present a theory that rationalizes voters' preferences for decisive leaders. Greater decisiveness entails an inclination to reach decisions more quickly conditional on fixed information. Although speed can be good or bad, agency problems between voters and politicians create preferences among...

We develop a model of college assignment as a large contest wherein students with heterogeneous abilities compete for seats at vertically differentiated colleges through the acquisition of productive human capital. We use a continuum model to approximate the outcomes of a game with large, but...

We study signaling environments with two features that are common in practice: first, complete-information bliss points are heterogeneous across different types of senders; second, receivers observe many choices by each sender, rather than a single decision. We prove that, ironically, a...

I first provide a static model of associative memory, a mnemonic process wherein cues in the environment bias information recalled from memory. I apply the model in a principal-agent setting to analyze contradictory predictions for the relationship between employee morale and productivity from...

Substantial price variation for homogeneous goods in online markets is a well-known puzzle that has withstood attempts by empirical researchers to explain it. Economic theory suggests two possible sources of the dispersion: either market frictions are more important than previously thought, or...

Private-order market institutions founded on trust-based relational contracts suffer adverse selection and moral hazard problems, while public-order market institutions have a limited capacity to enforce contracts. I model agent selection between contract enforcement institutions and demonstrate...