Nathaniel Hickok
Thesis Writer
Research Fields
Industrial Organization, Environmental EconomicsContact Information
Email Address
nhickok@mit.edu
Optimal Urban Transportation Policy: Evidence from Chicago
with Milena Almagro, Felipe Barbieri, Juan Camilo Castillo, and Tobias Salz
Revise and Resubmit, Econometrica, August 2024
We characterize and quantify optimal urban transportation policies in the presence of congestion and environmental externalities. We formulate a framework in which a municipal government chooses among transportation equilibria through its choice of public transit policies---prices and frequencies---as well as road pricing. The government faces a budget constraint that introduces monopoly-like distortions and the potential need to cross-subsidize modes. We apply this framework to Chicago, for which we construct a new dataset that comprehensively captures transportation choices. We find that road pricing alone leads to large welfare gains by reducing externalities, but at the expense of travelers, whose surplus falls even if road pricing revenues are fully rebated. The optimal public transit price is near zero, with reduced bus and increased train frequencies. Combining transit policies with road pricing slackens the budget constraint, allowing for higher transit frequencies and lower prices, thereby increasing consumer surplus after rebates.
August 2024
Platforms often use price recommendation algorithms to suggest prices to firms based on the platform's private information about demand conditions. I develop a theoretical model and algorithmic experiments to study the impact of platform price recommendations under three types of firm conduct: collusion, competition, and when firms use pricing algorithms. When firms are either collusive or competitive I show theoretically that the platform's optimal price recommendation system is generically fully informative, and that this outcome is consumer-pessimal. When firms use pricing algorithms I find in algorithmic experiments that the introduction of a price recommendation system reduces average consumer surplus by 31%.
Research in Progress
Out with the Old, In with the New: The Importance of Secondary Markets for Electric Vehicle Subsidy Design (with Aaron Berman and Linh Nguyen)
Groundwater, Agricultural Land Use, and Adaptation to Water Scarcity: Evidence from the High Plains (with Aaron Berman)