About

Yaron Azrieli is a Professor in the Department of Economics at The Ohio State University. He holds a Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University, earned in 2008, along with an M.Sc. from 2004 and a B.Sc. from 2001, both from Tel Aviv University. His areas of expertise include Game Theory, Microeconomic Theory, and Mathematical Economics. He is based in Bricker Hall at Ohio State, with contact information including his email azrieli.2@osu.edu and phone number 614.688.4140. His professional focus involves research in economic theory, particularly in the fields of game theory and mathematical economics.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Economics
• Microeconomics
• Mathematics
• Operations research
• Mathematical economics
• Machine Learning
• Mathematical optimization
• Business

Selected publications

• Marginal stochastic choice

  Theoretical Economics · 2026-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Models of stochastic choice typically use conditional choice probabilities given menus as the primitive for analysis, but in the field these are often hard to observe. We consider the case where an analyst has access to a marginal stochastic choice dataset containing the marginal distributions of available menus and of choices, but not to conditional choice frequencies. The Random Utility Model (RUM) has no testable implications for such datasets, but any restriction on the domain of feasible preference orders does limit the set of rationalizable marginals. The Luce model can also rationalize essentially any dataset, but unlike RUM its parameters can often be identified. We also demonstrate that additional testable implications for the marginals may arise when the distribution of menus is endogenous.

  PublisherDOI

• Anonymous voting in a heterogeneous society

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Anonymous voting in a heterogeneous society

  ArXiv.org · 2025-08-11

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We study the design of voting mechanisms in a binary social choice environment where agents' cardinal valuations are independent but not necessarily identically distributed. The mechanism must be anonymous -- the outcome is invariant to permutations of the reported values. We show that if there are two agents then expected welfare is always maximized by an ordinal majority rule, but with three or more agents there are environments in which cardinal mechanisms that take into account preference intensities outperform any ordinal mechanism.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Temporary exclusion in repeated contests

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Business
  • Economics

  Consider a population of agents who repeatedly compete for awards, as in the case of researchers annually applying for grants. Noise in the selection process may encourage entry of low quality proposals, forcing the principal to commit large resources to reviewing applications and further increasing award misallocation. A \emph{temporary exclusion} policy prohibits an agent from applying in the current period if they were rejected in the previous. We compare the steady state equilibria of the games with and without exclusion. Whenever the benefit from winning is sufficiently large exclusion results in more self-selection, eliminating entry of low quality applications. We extend the analysis to more general exclusion policies. We also show that exclusion has a distributional effect, where better able agents exhibit more self-selection.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Success functions in large contests

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-03-11

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We consider contests with a large set (continuum) of participants and axiomatize contest success functions that arise when performance is composed of both effort and a random element, and when winners are those whose performance exceeds a cutoff determined by a market clearing condition. A co-monotonicity property is essentially all that is needed for a representation in the general case, but significantly stronger conditions must hold to obtain an additive structure. We illustrate the usefulness of this framework by revisiting some of the classic questions in the contests literature.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Delegated expertise: Implementability with peer-monitoring

  Games and Economic Behavior · 2022-01-15 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Monitoring experts

  Theoretical Economics · 2021 · 6 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Operations research

  We study the design of contracts that incentivize experts to collect information and truthfully report it to a decision maker. We depart from most of the previous literature by assuming that the transfers cannot depend on the realized state or on the ex post payoff of the decision maker. The contract thus has to induce the experts to “monitor each other” by making the transfers contingent on the entire vector of reports. We characterize the least costly contract that implements any given vector of efforts and derive the cost function for the decision maker. We then study properties of optimal contracts by comparing the value of information and its cost.

  PublisherDOI

• Constrained versus Unconstrained Rational Inattention

  Games · 2021 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Mathematical economics
  • Mathematics

  The rational inattention literature is split between two versions of the model: in one, mutual information of states and signals are bounded by a hard constraint, while, in the other, it appears as an additive term in the decision maker’s utility function. The resulting constrained and unconstrained maximization problems are closely related, but, nevertheless, their solutions differ in certain aspects. In particular, movements in the decision maker’s prior belief and utility function lead to opposite comparative statics conclusions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Constrained preference elicitation

  Theoretical Economics · 2021-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  A planner wants to elicit information about an agent's preference relation, but not the entire ordering. Specifically, preferences are grouped into “types,” and the planner wants only to elicit the agent's type. We first assume that beliefs about randomization are subjective, and show that a space of types is elicitable if and only if each type is defined by what the agent would choose from some list of menus. If beliefs are objective, then additional type spaces can be elicited, though a convexity condition must be satisfied. These results remain unchanged when we consider a setting with multiple agents.

  PublisherDOI

• Incentives in experiments with objective lotteries

  Experimental Economics · 2019-03-12 · 39 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Azrieli et al. (J Polit Econ, 2018) provide a characterization of incentive compatible payment mechanisms for experiments, assuming subjects’ preferences respect dominance but can have any possible subjective beliefs over random outcomes. If instead we assume subjects view probabilities as objective—for example, when dice or coins are used—then the set of incentive compatible mechanisms may grow. In this paper we show that it does, but the added mechanisms are not widely applicable. As in the subjective-beliefs framework, the only broadly-applicable incentive compatible mechanism (assuming all preferences that respect dominance are admissible) is to pay subjects for one randomly-selected decision.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Christopher P. Chambers

  20 shared

• Paul J. Healy

  19 shared

• Ehud Lehrer

  15 shared

• Eran Shmaya

  Stony Brook University

  9 shared

• Dan Levin

  3 shared

• Roee Teper

  University of Pittsburgh

  3 shared

• Semin Kim

  Yonsei University

  2 shared

• Ritesh Jain

  1 shared