About

Simon Board is a professor of economics at UCLA Anderson. He is a microeconomic theorist with interests in contract theory, industrial organization, and labor economics. His recent research includes the design of dynamic pricing algorithms and the role of reputation in incentivizing investment.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Microeconomics
• Economics
• Psychology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Sociology
• Labour economics
• Social psychology
• Mathematics
• Finance
• Econometrics
• Knowledge management
• Demographic economics
• Industrial organization
• Biology
• Business

Selected publications

• Exploring the Value of Student Autonomy in Physical Education: Two Case Studies in the UK and Australia

  Journal of Physical Education Recreation & Dance · 2025-01-02

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Physical education can be a subject that students find challenging when they are given little autonomy. This article explores two high school case studies, in the UK and Australia respectively, where students were given a great deal of choice over their learning and assessment journeys. In the UK case study, a Sport England survey was used with students for them to identify which personality type they were of six: confident intellectuals; cautious introverts; everyday youths; thoughtful improvers; ambitious self-starters; sports enthusiasts. Activities were subsequently selected by students in accordance with their personality type. Developing a personality-focused method such as this was found to be a useful tool in curriculum design. In the Australia case study, autonomy was offered through a SOLO Taxonomy-focused intervention, pre and post COVID. This involved students becoming empowered through their participation in the design and assessment of activities via a strength-based approach. Both case studies were successful in their own way, helping to improve students’ engagement and enjoyment levels, thereby facilitating their positive connections with movement and the subject of PE more generally. These types of autonomy-focused approaches might help pave the way towards increased physical activity beyond the school walls into adulthood.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Simple Contagion Dynamics in Tree-like Networks

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Experimentation in Networks

  American Economic Review · 2024-08-29 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We propose a model of strategic experimentation on social networks in which forward-looking agents learn from their own and neighbors’ successes. In equilibrium, private discovery is followed by social diffusion. Social learning crowds out own experimentation, so total information decreases with network density; we determine density thresholds below which agents’ asymptotic learning is perfect. By contrast, agent welfare is single peaked in network density and achieves a second-best benchmark level at intermediate levels that strike a balance between discovery and diffusion. (JEL D82, D83, D86, O31, O33, Z13)

  PublisherDOI

• Discrimination in Hiring: Evidence from Retail Sales

  The Review of Economic Studies · 2023 · 34 citations

  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  • Econometrics

  Abstract We propose a simple model of racial bias in hiring that encompasses three major theories: taste-based discrimination, screening discrimination, and complementary production. We derive a test that can distinguish these theories based on the mean and variance of workers’ productivity under managers of different pairs of races. We apply this test to study discrimination at a major U.S. retailer using data from 48,755 newly hired commission-based salespeople. White, black, and Hispanic managers within the same store are significantly more likely to hire workers of their own race, consistent with all three theories. For black–Hispanic pairs, productivity variance is lower for same-race pairs than cross-race pairs, implying that screening discrimination dominates. For white–Hispanic pairs, mean productivity is higher for same-race pairs, indicating a combination of screening discrimination and complementary production. For white–black pairs, biased hiring implies the presence of discrimination, but productivity results suggest the effects of the three forms of discrimination offset one another.

  PublisherDOI

• Experimentation in Networks

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A Reputational Theory of Firm Dynamics

  American Economic Journal Microeconomics · 2022 · 24 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Microeconomics
  • Business
  • Economics

  We study the life cycle of a firm that produces a good of unknown quality. The firm manages its quality by investing while consumers learn via public breakthroughs; if the firm fails to generate such breakthroughs, its revenue falls and it eventually exits. Optimal investment depends on the firm’s reputation (the market’s belief about its quality) and self-esteem (the firm’s own belief about its quality), and is single-peaked in the time since a breakthrough. We derive predictions about the distribution of revenue and propose a method to decompose the impact of policy changes into investment and selection effects. (JEL D11, D21, D25, D83, G31, L15)

  PublisherDOI

• Discrimination in Hiring: Evidence from Retail Sales

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Learning Dynamics in Social Networks

  Econometrica · 2021 · 23 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science

  This paper proposes a tractable model of Bayesian learning on large random networks where agents choose whether to adopt an innovation. We study the impact of the network structure on learning dynamics and product diffusion. In directed networks, all direct and indirect links contribute to agents' learning. In comparison, learning and welfare are lower in undirected networks and networks with cliques. In a rich class of networks, behavior is described by a small number of differential equations, making the model useful for empirical work.

  PublisherDOI

• Competitive Information Disclosure in Search Markets

  Journal of Political Economy · 2018-06-12 · 97 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Buyers often search across sellers to learn which product best fits their needs. We study how sellers manage these search incentives through their disclosure strategies (e.g., product trials, reviews, and recommendations) and ask how competition affects information provision. If sellers can observe the beliefs of buyers or can coordinate their strategies, then there is an equilibrium in which sellers provide the “monopoly level” of information. In contrast, if buyers’ beliefs are private, then there is an equilibrium in which sellers provide full information as search costs vanish. Anonymity and coordination thus play important roles in understanding how advice markets work.

  PublisherDOI

• Revenue Management with Forward-Looking Buyers

  Journal of Political Economy · 2016-06-30 · 148 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  A seller wishes to sell multiple goods by a deadline, for example, the end of a season. Potential buyers enter over time and can strategically time their purchases. Each period, the profit-maximizing mechanism awards units to the buyers with the highest valuations exceeding a sequence of cutoffs. We show that these cutoffs are deterministic, depending only on the inventory and time remaining; in the continuous-time limit, the optimal mechanism can be implemented by posting anonymous prices. When incoming demand decreases over time, the optimal cutoffs satisfy a one-period-look-ahead property and prices are defined by an intuitive differential equation.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Moritz Meyer-ter-Vehn

  UCLA Health

  14 shared

• Jay Lu

  University of California, Los Angeles

  3 shared

• Alan Benson

  3 shared

• Andrzej Skrzypacz

  3 shared

• Paul Klemperer

  University of Oxford

  2 shared

• Marek Pycia

  University of Zurich

  2 shared

• M. Meyer

  University of Oxford

  1 shared

• Nicola Persico

  Northwestern University

  1 shared