American Economic Journal Best Paper Prize

Rahul Deb co-authored “Discrimination via Symmetric Auctions”, the best microeconomics paper

April 2020

 

In their paper, Rahul Deb and Mallesh Pai find a major flaw in the strategy many US states are using to ensure that procurement auctions don’t have rules biased in favor of bidders from certain groups. They show that the current approach—a so-called symmetric auction—imposes virtually no restrictions on sellers’ ability to discriminate. Instead, the researchers offer their own set of simple policies governments can use to enforce fairer outcomes. (AEJ: Microeconomics, Vol 9, No. 1, February 2017.)

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