Evgeniya Kudinova

Evgeniya Kudinova

Job Market Candidate

Department of Economics

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Languages
English, Russian
Key Expertise
Microeconomic Theory

About me

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Economics, primarily interested in microeconomic theory and also in political economy. My most recent research focuses on experimentation models where decision makers can endogenously change the options available to them. Specifically, my job market paper looks at an agent who adapts to new opportunity, like new technology or change in career path, and can invest in improving this risky option’s outcome. 

I hold a BA in Economics from New Economic School and Higher School of Economics, and MSc and MRes in Economics from the LSE. 

Expertise Details

Political Economy

Contacts and Referees

Placement Officer
Matthias Doepke

Supervisors
Gilat Levy 
Ronny Razin 
Stephane Wolton

References
Gilat Levy 
Department of Economics
London School of Economics and Political Sciences
Houghton St, London WC2A 2AE
g.levy1@lse.ac.uk

Ronny Razin
Department of Economics
London School of Economics and Political Sciences
Houghton St, London WC2A 2AE
r.razin@lse.ac.uk

Stephane Wolton 
Department of Government
London School of Economics and Political Sciences
Houghton St, London WC2A 2AE
s.wolton@lse.ac.uk

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Job Market Paper

Experimentation with Endogenously Changing Arms 

I build on a single risky arm Poisson bandit environment and explore how the ability to endogenously change the arm affects the incentives for experimentation. More specifically, I assume that the decision maker can choose to improve the risky arm at a fixed cost by switching the bad arm to a good one. Such setup can be applied to analyse economic agents in their adaptation to new opportunities, like new technology, change in career path or hiring a new trainee, when the agents can invest in increasing the likelihood of successful outcome. 

As opposed to standard good news Poisson bandits, I find that beliefs may evolve non-monotonically and that the decision maker may prefer to be stuck on a certain belief and invest forever at some intensity conditional on obtaining no news. In the context of adaptation, this means that the agent may keep pursuing the new opportunity forever despite not reaching a success, in contrast to necessarily giving up according to the traditional experimentation models. On a technical front, I show that the resulting value function may violate the smooth pasting, as well as require extra condition on top of traditionally used value matching and smooth pasting to identify a solution. 

Download the paper

Publications and Research

Working papers

Abstention as a Protest Vote [draft available on demand] 
I look at the strategic voting model where the citizens are influenced by election and protesting motivations. In particular, I study elections with two responsive candidates who, based on election outcome, set a two-dimensional response, which contains policies that differ in salience – a salient and a previously excluded one, upon winning. The citizens share a common but imperfectly observed preference about a better fitting candidate along the salient dimension, but are polarized in their views towards the excluded policy, which they wish to communicate through the elections (being uncertain about which view prevails in society). I focus on a subset of symmetric equilibria and show the existence of a separating equilibrium where one of the polarized groups abstains and the other votes according to their private signal. In large elections, such equilibrium achieves full information aggregation and perfect preference transmission; however, it exists only if the population is balanced enough and if the private information precision is relatively high. Finally, I derive conditions for such outcome to be efficient. Among other, the model may shed the light on why citizens vote in imperfect (including non-democratic) political environments.

Contact Information

Email
e.kudinova@lse.ac.uk

Office Address
Department of Economics
London School of Economics and Political Science
Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE