Homepage of Matthew W. Thomas, an Economist
Markets tend not to accommodate disabled workers and consumers without outside intervention. There are numerous studies about disabled workers (e.g., Haveman and Wolfe 2000 , Aizawa et al. 2024 ). However, I could only find one paper about how markets fail disabled consumers. [1] I have been thinking about this issue for the last few years. I hope my thoughts are interesting both to economists…
This is a short guide to document my experience in enabling TeX support in Mastodon by injecting KaTeX into the interface. I use this setup on https://econtwitter.net . This differs from the Mathsodon fork I used previously in that it does not require direct modification of the Mastodon code. I instead inject KaTeX into the interface using nginx at the proxy level. As a result, we can install…
This is a short guide to document my experience in enabling TeX support in Mastodon by installing Christian Lawson-Perfect’s Mathstodon fork . As of the time of writing, this fork is based on Mastodon 4.5.3 and there are no official installation instructions. This guide assumes that you already have a functional installation of Mastodon 4.5.3. If you do not, you should follow the Mastodon…
There are many settings in Economics, particularly in mechanism design, where one wants to fund a function that maximizes (or minimizes) some objective. It turns out this works similarly to regular calculus. Motivation Consider the expected revenue of a mechanism designed to sell a good to one agent who’s value of the good is distributed uniformly with support [ 0 , 1 ] [ 0, 1 ] [ 0 , 1 ] . This…
I show that any efficient two player symmetric allocation rule between risk neutral, heterogenous players generates weakly less revenue than one of two contests. The revenue maximizing efficient symmetric contest is an all-pay auction with bid caps (Che and Gale 1998) when heterogeneity is low and a difference form contest (Che and Gale 2000) when heterogeneity is high. Introduction Contests are…
This is a quick post about how to fix an annoying R bug on Windows 10 caused by OneDrive. Many users use OneDrive to sync their Documents folder. Unfortunately, R stores libraries in the Documents folder, and OneDrive creates sync locks that interfere with the installation and updating of packages. The solution is to set the R_LIBS_USER environment variable to a folder that is not synced by…
These notes summarize concepts introduced in Nti (1999) , Fang (2002) , Nti (2004) , Epstein et al (2013) , and Ewerhart (2017a) about revenue maximization in Tullock lottery contests. Introduction Contests are models of conflict where risk neutral players exert costly effort to win a prize. A lottery contest is any contest where there is not a deterministic relationship between effort and…
These notes are about nonlinear war of attrition models with two players. The formulation we consider is a simplified version of Hendricks, Weiss, and Wilson (1988) . These models are popular for modeling conflict that occurs in continuous time including wars, filibusters, bribes, and competition for standards and monopolies. Basics The war of attrition is a second price all-pay auction. That is,…
About two years ago, Maria Betto and I made Econ Ipsum , a Lorem Ipsum generator that uses words from Econometrica abstracts to produce Economic sounding nonsense. We never put any sort of tracking or analytics on the page. So, I don’t know how many people use it. However, I can tell from the number of api calls that it is more than originally expected. [1] One long running joke on the page is…
This is a list I compiled of other blogs about Economics. If you would like to add or get added to this list, contact me, comment, or just submit a request to edit the file that generates this list . — A Fine Theorem Academic Health Economists’ Blog Alt-M Angry Bear Antonio Fatas Arnold Kling Bank Underground Brad DeLong Cafe Hayek Calculated Risk Capital Ebbs and Flows Carola Binder Causal…
I recently came across a paper published in Management Science that proposes Quadratic Finance (QF), a a quadratic voting mechanism to allocate funds to public goods such as open source software. This has generated an understandable amount of excitement and there are already several cases in which it has been implemented. FundOSS Gitcoin Grants Downtown Stimulus clr.fund This mechanism has also…
If put your email in plaintext on your website, you will get spam from people trying to sell you SEO, development services, ghostwriting, etc. Emails get on spam lists through website scraping. The way that this works is simple. Scrapers typically look for strings like user@host.tld or mailto:user@host.tld in your HTML. I used to use the Scrape Shield provided by Cloudflare. However, when I…
Conventional proof by induction allows you to prove that a statement applies to an infinite sequence. The argument is that if a property holds on the first element, and always holds on the next element, then it must hold on all elements. But what do you do when there is no next element? Some notes on the arXiv show that there is an analogous version to proof by induction that can apply to…
Basic usage Single terminal To launch screen, just run screen Then run all of your commands like stata -b do filename . When you want to “minimize” the terminal, just press Ctrl+A followed by the D key. You can then safely log out of ssh without killing the precess that you ran. exit When ssh back into the server, you can check back on the process by running screen -r This will reopen the terminal…