Professor Todd Kaplan

About me:

Professor Todd Kaplan is a part-time Professor specializing in Economic Theory and Behavioral Economics. He has been a faculty member since 2000. He also has a position in Economics Department at the University of Haifa. He has received grants from the Nuffield Foundation, British Academy, iFree Foundation, ESRC, Leverhulme Foundation and the Israeli Science Foundation. He was a co-winner for the Economics Network 2009 e-learning award for developing teaching resources in a grant from HEFCE. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics.

Nationality: USA / Israel

• Economic theory
• Industrial organisation
• Experimental economics

Professor Kaplan has diverse research interests that span theoretical and experimental economics. My theoretical work has mostly centered on contests, auctions and mechanism design. While contests have been used to spur innovation since the British Parliament introduced the Longitude prize in 1714, it has become in vogue to spur innovation with both non-profit initiatives such as the X-prize and company-sponsored prizes such as one by Netfix. He has published five papers on such contests and their optimal design: Journal of Industrial Economics (2002), International Journal of Industrial Organization (2003), American Economic Review (2006), RAND (2008), Economics Letters (2010), and Review of Economic Design (2015). One work on auctions (Economic Theory, 2012) solved a problem thought intractable since Vickrey claimed so (over 40 years ago) in one of his seminal Nobel-Prize winning papers. Todd continued this work by looking at multiple equilibria in first-price auctions (Economic Theory Bulletin, 2015). More recently, he applied asymmetric auctions to International Trade (Journal of International Economics, 2017). Due to his experience in auctions, Todd was invited to contribute a chapter on auctions to the Handbook of Game Theory (2014).

Todd’s more recent theoretical research considers someone who needs to allocate goods among individuals who can put forth efforts, but the only value of the individuals' efforts is what they imply about the individuals’ desires about the good (GEB, 2013). Related to this research, Todd published work on using voting systems to allocate goods and discovered conditions where, counter intuitively, adding a cost to voting improves welfare, Journal of Public Economics (forthcoming).

Todd also has a significant research interest in experimental and behavioural economics. Todd has a paper on Self-Serving biases in Economic Inquiry (2004), a topic for which Todd published a comment in Journal of Economic Perspectives. Todd has experimentally tested a computer recommendation system in JORS (2011). Todd’s recent publication (Economic Journal, 2012) studies under what conditions cooperation will form in a particularly difficult environment. An extension to this work is forthcoming in JEBO. Todd’s current research is to experimentally investigate bank runs. After an initial publication in European Economic Review (2014), Todd received an ISF grant to continue this path. This builds upon Todd’s theoretical work initially done as part of his PhD dissertation and published in Economic Theory (2006).

Todd also has interdisciplinary work both in Operations Research and Meteorology that involves applying experimental economics methodology to other fields. In Meteorology, Todd worked with co-authors from the UK Met Office to examine the communication of weather risks in Met Applications (2009), Weather and Forecasting (2014), and International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction (2018). In Operations Research, Todd tested the usefulness of decision support systems with experimental methods in Journal of the Operational Research Society (2011a, 2011b).

Earlier contributions were in the field of computational economics:
Mathematica Journal (1991) and two chapters in a best-selling book edited by Hal Varian (1993). In part of this, by desire to get a computer aid for game theory homework, Todd inadvertently discovered a new algorithm for finding Nash equilibria. Probably Todd’s best-known work is the “Kaplan” strategy. This was a simple computer strategy designed to compete in a simplified stock exchange. It won a well-advertised tournament by the Santa Fe Institute.

Todd’s earlier work includes looking at how a group should divide the cost from a shared production function. For instance, how do two friends divide the costs when sharing a pizza. This is not so easy since they must also decide what size of pizza to order and a poor rule may cause them to overspend or underspend. Todd answers this in International Economic Review (2000) and Journal of Mathematical Economics (1999). Todd also has written on such eclectic topics as steroid use in sports (Labour Economics, 2011) and gift giving (European Economic Review, 2009) both receiving significant attention from the press.

BS (Caltech), MA (Minnesota), PhD (Minnesota)