We study how diversity evolves at a firm with entry-level and upper-level employees who vary in ability and "type" (gender or ethnicity). The ability of entry-level employees is increased by mentoring. An employee receives more mentoring when more upper-level employees have the same type. Optimal promotions are biased by type, and this bias may favor either the minority or the majority. We char...

Firms jointly sell durable primary hardware and complementary software in many industries, but it remains unclear how they can coordinate the two products to conduct intertemporal price discrimination (IPD). In addition to the harvesting (i.e., pricecutting over time) incentive in the traditional single-product IPD literature, firms selling complementary products have another investing (i.e., p...

We propose an approach for learning optimal tree-based prescription policies directly from data, combining methods counterfactual estimation the causal inference literature with recent advances in training globally-optimal decision trees. The resulting method, Optimal Policy Trees, yields interpretable policies, is highly scalable, and handles both discrete continuous treatments. conduct extens...

This paper shows that the optimal policy to deal with unemployment features important roles for monitoring of search and job assistance, combined also incorporating more generous insurance (UI). These results are significantly different from previous literature, which has overwhelmingly focused on UI its own. I incorporate two empirically relevant phenomena have often been ignored: private cons...

Increasing centralization of the control of fisheries combined with increased knowledge of food-web relationships is likely to lead to attempts to maximize economic yield from entire food webs. With the exception of predator-prey systems, we lack any analysis of the nature of such yield-maximizing strategies. We use simple food-web models to investigate the nature of yield- or profit-maximizing...