About

My research focuses on mechanism design and auction theory, and their applications to the design of blockchains and decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols. I have also worked on the economics of privacy, social networks, social learning, and statistical decision theory.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Machine Learning
• Algorithm
• Microeconomics
• Economics
• Mathematics
• Business

Selected publications

• Does Your Blockchain Need Multidimensional Transaction Fees?

  ArXiv.org · 2025-04-21

  preprintOpen access

  Blockchains have block-size limits to ensure the entire cluster can keep up with the tip of the chain. These block-size limits are usually single-dimensional, but richer multidimensional constraints allow for greater throughput. The potential for performance improvements from multidimensional resource pricing has been discussed in the literature, but exactly how big those performance improvements are remains unclear. In order to identify the magnitude of additional throughput that multi-dimensional transaction fees can unlock, we introduce the concept of an $α$-approximation. A constraint set $C_1$ is $α$-approximated by $C_2$ if every block feasible under $C_1$ is also feasible under $C_2$ once all resource capacities are scaled by a factor of $α$ (e.g., $α=2$ corresponds to doubling all available resources). We show that the $α$-approximation of the optimal single-dimensional gas measure corresponds to the value of a specific zero-sum game. However, the more general problem of finding the optimal $k$-dimensional approximation is NP-complete. Quantifying the additional throughput that multi-dimensional fees can provide allows blockchain designers to make informed decisions about whether the additional capacity unlocked by multidimensional constraints is worth the additional complexity they add to the protocol.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Indirect Persuasion

  Journal of Political Economy · 2025-10-28

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Signaling Design

  ArXiv.org · 2025-02-04

  preprintOpen access

  We revisit the classic job-market signaling model of \cite{spence1973job}, introducing profit-seeking schools as intermediaries that design the mapping from candidates' efforts to job-market signals. Each school commits to an attendance fee and a monitoring policy. We show that, in equilibrium, a monopolist school captures the entire social surplus by committing to low information signals and charging fees that extract students' surplus from being hired. In contrast, competition shifts surplus to students, with schools vying to attract high-ability students, enabling them to distinguish themselves from their lower-ability peers. However, this increased signal informativeness leads to more wasteful effort in equilibrium, contrasting with the usual argument that competition enhances social efficiency. This result may be reversed if schools face binding fee caps or students are credit-constrained.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Measuring CEX-DEX Extracted Value and Searcher Profitability: The Darkest of the MEV Dark Forest

  ArXiv.org · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This paper provides a comprehensive empirical analysis of the economics and dynamics behind arbitrages between centralized and decentralized exchanges (CEX-DEX) on Ethereum. We refine heuristics to identify arbitrage transactions from on-chain data and introduce a robust empirical framework to estimate arbitrage revenue without knowing traders' actual behaviors on CEX. Leveraging an extensive dataset spanning 19 months from August 2023 to March 2025, we estimate a total of 233.8M USD extracted by 19 major CEX-DEX searchers from 7,203,560 identified CEX-DEX arbitrages. Our analysis reveals increasing centralization trends as three searchers captured three-quarters of both volume and extracted value. We also demonstrate that searchers' profitability is tied to their integration level with block builders and uncover exclusive searcher-builder relationships and their market impact. Finally, we correct the previously underestimated profitability of block builders who vertically integrate with a searcher. These insights illuminate the darkest corner of the MEV landscape and highlight the critical implications of CEX-DEX arbitrages for Ethereum's decentralization.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Latency Advantages in Common-Value Auctions

  ArXiv.org · 2025-04-02

  preprintOpen access

  In financial applications, latency advantages -- the ability to make decisions later than others, even without the ability to see what others have done -- can provide individual participants with an edge by allowing them to gather additional relevant information. For example, a trader who is able to act even milliseconds after another trader may receive information about changing prices on other exchanges that lets them make a profit at the expense of the latter. To better understand the economics of latency advantages, we consider a common-value auction with a reserve price in which some bidders may have more information about the value of the item than others, e.g., by bidding later. We provide a characterization of the equilibrium strategies, and study the welfare and auctioneer revenue implications of the last-mover advantage. We show that the auction does not degenerate completely and that the seller is still able to capture some value. We study comparative statics of the equilibrium under different assumptions about the nature of the latency advantage. Under the assumptions of the Black-Scholes model, we derive formulas for the last mover's expected profit, as well as for the sensitivity of that profit to their timing advantage. We apply our results to the design of blockchain protocols that aim to run auctions for financial assets on-chain, where incentives to increase timing advantages can put pressure on the decentralization of the system.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• SPARC: Staking Performance And Reward Coopetition

  ArXiv.org · 2025-05-15

  preprintOpen access

  This paper presents a novel staking coopetition design aimed at incentivizing decentralization and continuous growth of economic security within a proof-of-stake system. Staking rewards follow a nonlinear mapping relative to stake size. This affords the highest effective yields to smaller operators, fueling network growth and giving users an incentive to delegate their stake to smaller operators. This prevents the preferential accrual and centralization of stake seen in popular blockchains such as Ethereum, where popular liquid staking protocols control large fractions of the total stake thereby having outsized potential impacts on the economic security of the protocol. The proposed system addresses key challenges such as Sybil attacks and offers a comprehensive framework for future research and implementation. We introduce innovative mechanisms and gamification elements, to enhance user engagement and provide transparency in emissions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Optimizing Exit Queues for Proof-Of-Stake Blockchains: A Mechanism Design Approach

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols have provable safety and liveness properties for static validator sets. In practice, however, the validator set changes over time, potentially eroding the protocol's security guarantees. For example, systems with accountable safety may lose some of that accountability over time as adversarial validators exit. As a result, protocols must rate limit entry and exit so that the set changes slowly enough to ensure security. Here, the system designer faces a fundamental trade-off. Slower exits increase friction, making it less attractive to stake in the first place. Faster exits provide more utility to stakers but weaken the protocol's security. This paper provides the first systematic study of exit queues for Proof-of-Stake blockchains. Given a collection of validator-set consistency constraints imposed by the protocol, the social planner's goal is to provide a constrained-optimal mechanism that minimizes disutility for the participants. We introduce the MINSLACK mechanism, a dynamic capacity first-come-first-served queue in which the amount of stake that can exit in a period depends on the number of previous exits and the consistency constraints. We show that MINSLACK is optimal when stakers equally value the processing of their withdrawal. When stakers values are heterogeneous, the optimal mechanism resembles a priority queue with dynamic capacity. However, this mechanism must reserve exit capacity for the future in case a staker with a much higher need for liquidity arrives. We conclude with a survey of known consistency constraints and highlight the diversity of existing exit mechanisms.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Structural Advantages for Integrated Builders in MEV-Boost

  Lecture notes in computer science · 2024-11-29 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Strategy investments in zero-sum games

  Optimization Letters · 2024-06-24

  articleOpen access

  We propose an extension of two-player zero-sum games, where one player may select available actions for themselves and the opponent, subject to a budget constraint. We present a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulation for the problem, provide analytical results regarding its solution, and discuss applications in the security and advertising domains. Our computational experiments demonstrate that heuristic approaches, on average, yield suboptimal solutions with at least a 20% relative gap with those obtained by the MILP formulation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How much should you pay for restaking security?

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-08-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Restaking protocols have aggregated billions of dollars of security by utilizing token incentives and payments. A natural question to ask is: How much security do restaked services \emph{really} need to purchase? To answer this question, we expand a model of Durvasula and Roughgarden [DR24] that includes incentives and an expanded threat model consisting of strategic attackers and users. Our model shows that an adversary with a strictly submodular profit combined with strategic node operators who respond to incentives can avoid the large-scale cascading failures of~[DR24]. We utilize our model to construct an approximation algorithm for choosing token-based incentives that achieve a given security level against adversaries who are bounded in the number of services they can simultaneously attack. Our results suggest that incentivized restaking protocols can be secure with proper incentive management.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• AF: Medium: Collaborative Research: Foundations of Fair Data Analysis

  NSF · $250k · 2018–2023

Frequent coauthors

• Aaron Roth

  30 shared

• Rahul Deb

  Wildlife Institute of India

  22 shared

• Rakesh Vohra

  18 shared

• Matthew Mitchell

  Deakin University

  11 shared

• Manuel Mueller‐Frank

  Pearson (United States)

  11 shared

• Michael Kearns

  10 shared

• Jonathan Ullman

  Northeastern University

  9 shared

• Chang Hwa Lee

  Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute

  7 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Managerial Economics and Strategy

  Kellogg School of Management

• B.S., Computer Science and Engineering

  Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi