Email: sy677@georgetown.edu

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.

Curriculum Vitae

  • 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.

  • (Paper)

    I develop a stochastic choice model in which a constrained decision maker is influenced by influence exposures from a richer choice set. The model predicts aspirational dampening: when the influencer places more weight on alternatives outside the decision maker’s feasible set, the influence on choices among feasible alternatives is weakened. I characterize the model axiomatically and show how influence strength and baseline preferences can be identified from choice data.

Job Market Paper

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.

Working Papers

  • In sequential review processes, early analytical work may be evaluated only after later reviewers have revised, confirmed, or overturned it. I study a principal–agent model in which hidden effort improves an initial recommendation, which then enters a downstream review process. The paper compares outcome-based evaluation with process-based evaluation. When the review process is good at repairing early mistakes, final performance becomes a weaker signal of early effort, while survival through review can remain informative.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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.