I'm Siming Ye, a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Georgetown University. I am a microeconomic theorist studying how information, constraints, and social comparison shape individual and collective decisions. My work combines decision theory, social learning, and social choice.
I am on the 2026-2027 academic job market.
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My research studies how information, constraints, and social comparison shape choices, recommendations, and institutional evaluation. My job-market paper studies constrained choice under aspirational influence: how exposure to alternatives outside a decision maker’s feasible set changes choices within the feasible set. A second strand studies sequential advice and accountability, asking when later review improves decisions but makes early effort harder to attribute. A third strand uses axiomatic methods to study social objectives and evidentiary rules when information is incomplete, ordinal, or multidimensional. Across these projects, I ask what observed choices, recommendations, and records reveal about the hidden information, constraints, and incentives that produced them.
Email: sy677@georgetown.edu
Publications
Haves and have-nots: A theory of economic sufficientarianism, with Christopher P. Chambers, Journal of Economic Theory, 2024
This paper develops axiomatic foundations for sufficientarian social welfare in multidimensional allocation problems. We characterize a sufficientarian criterion using sufficientarian judgment, symmetry, and separability, and relate the resulting ordering to leximin.
Job Market Paper
Aspiration-Weighted Influence
I model a consumer whose stochastic choices depend on the observed purchases of an external agent, the influencer. Some of the goods purchased by the influencer are unavailable to the consumer. These observed purchases provide the source of variation in the model. I develop a model with a baseline distribution for the consumer's choices in the absence of influence and a single influence parameter. Under additional conditions across menus, the baseline has a Luce representation. I behaviorally characterize the model and establish when variation in the influencer's purchases identifies the consumer's choice probabilities in the absence of influence and the influence parameter. The model predicts that the consumer responds more strongly to changes in the influencer's choices among available goods when these goods account for a larger share of the influencer's purchases.
Working Papers
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(New Draft Coming Soon!)
I study how organizations should reward work that is subsequently used and revised by others. An analyst’s effort improves the accuracy of an initial assessment. A reviewer combines a noisy observation of that assessment with independent information to make the final decision. The organization chooses the analyst’s compensation and acquires costly records to evaluate her work. I characterize optimal wages and record acquisition. Better information for the reviewer can improve final decisions while increasing the cost of inducing the analyst’s effort.
An earlier draft of this project circulated as “Washed Out by the Crowd? Accountability under Sequential Review.”
Earlier draft · July 2026 -
Lanfeng Li, draft (Lanfeng’s JMP)
We examine how couples respond to pension eligibility in developing countries by focusing on the rural Chinese pension system. Using data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, we employ a double regression discontinuity design to capture the sharp changes in eligibility at age 60. Our findings reveal a striking pattern that contrasts with developed nations: women increase their labor force participation when their husbands become pension-eligible, while men decrease their participation when their wives reach eligibility age. To explain these asymmetric responses, we extend collective household models to incorporate three key mechanisms: income effects from pension receipt, intra-household labor substitution, and age-based constraints on market access. The evidence supports an Added Worker Effect that persists even after spouses reach pension eligibility. We believe this brings policy insights into pension systems in developing countries with weak social safety nets.
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This paper studies how contest and auction formats affect players’ incentives to acquire information before competing. Comparing the all-pay auction, war of attrition, first-price auction, and second-price auction, we show that all-pay features tend to discourage information acquisition. Incentives are strongest in the first-price auction and weakest in the war of attrition, while the all-pay auction and the second-price auction cannot be deterministically ranked. The resulting ranking reverses the classic revenue ranking of these mechanisms, suggesting that revenue comparisons may change once information acquisition is endogenous.
Work in Progress
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This project studies how to measure the cost of disclosing partial ordinal information in two-sided allocation problems, such as school choice and matching. Instead of assuming that agents reveal complete rankings, we allow them to disclose only initial segments of their preference or priority lists. We axiomatize disclosure-cost measures on these truncated lists and show when such costs reduce to a simple count of revealed ranks. The analysis also identifies a richer class of nonlinear measures in which the marginal cost of revealing the next rank depends on the size of the remaining menu.