Jacob D. Leshno
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​Associate Professor of Economics
Chicago Booth School of Business 

​
Contact details:
5807 S Woodlawn Ave
Chicago, IL 60637
first.last -at- ChicagoBooth dot edu
My research is on market design, using theory to understand how to design better rules and mechanism that will enable markets to better reach their goals.
Much of my work is on matching markets, for example college admission and the NRMP residency match. Tractable cutoff characterization can help elucidate the structure of matching markets and facilitate empirical estimation and optimization for policy goals.
​Cryptocurrencies are a fascinating area for market design, as they are platforms with rules written in computer code. I taught a PhD class on the economics of distributed systems to bridge computer science theory and economic theory. If you are interested in class materials, please email me. 

Before joining Chicago Booth I was in Columbia Business School and spent a year as a postdoc at Microsoft Research New England. I did my PhD in Economics at Harvard, and got a M.Sc. and B.Sc. in pure math from Tel Aviv University. You can find my cv here. 

My adviser published a great popular book on market design, which you can find here:
http://www.amazon.com/Who-Gets-What-Why-Matchmaking/dp/0544291131


Publications

Dynamic Matching in Overloaded Waiting-Lists
American Economic Review, 2022
(older working paper version)

Monopoly without a Monopolist: An Economic Analysis of the Bitcoin Payment System
Review of Economic Studies, 2021
Selected for Highlights Beyond EC 2021

(preprint including online appendix, slides, presentation video)
Joint with Gur Huberman and Ciamac Moallemi

​The importance of memory for price discovery in decentralized markets
Games and Economic Behavior, 2021
Joint with Bary Pradelski

The Cutoff Structure of Top Trading Cycles in School Choice
Review of Economic Studies, 2020
(preprint, Supplementary Appendix)
Joint with Irene Lo

Bitcoin: An Impossibility Theorem for Proof-of-Work based Protocols
American Economic Review: Insights, 2020
Joint with Philipp Strack

Unbalanced Random Matching Markets: The Stark Effect of Competition
Journal of Political Economy, 2017
(Simulation Code (in C#), Figures)
Joint with Itai Ashlagi and Yash Kanoria

A Supply and Demand Framework for Two-Sided Matching Markets 
Journal of Political Economy, 2016 (Lead article)
(Supplementary Appendix, working paper version)
Joint with Eduardo M. Azevedo


Invited Publications

Large Matching Markets
prepared for the handbook of Online and Matching-Based Market Design​​

Cryptocurrencies as Marketplaces
NAE’s 2019 US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium

An Economist's Perspective on the Bitcoin Payment System
American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, 2019
Joint with Gur Huberman and Ciamac Moallemi

​
Working Papers

Information Acquisition in Matching Markets: The Role of Price Discovery
(Nontechnical coverage, Supplementary Appendix - Survey of Admission Systems)
Joint with Nicole Immorlica, Irene Lo, and Brendan Lucier
​
Stable Matching with Peer-Dependent Preferences in Large Markets: Existence and Cutoff Characterization

Price Discovery in Waiting Lists
(slides, video) 
Joint with 
Itai Ashlagi, Pengyu Qian, and Amin Saberi


Older Papers

Universal Communication via Robust Coordination
Joint with Madhu Sudan

Lexicographic Probabilities as Similarity-Weighted Frequencies



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