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Conrad Kosowsky

Publications and source records attributed to Conrad Kosowsky.

4 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2024

Reinterpreting Delay and Procrastination

I model a rational agent who experiences endogenous deadline pressure in the face of a fixed future deadline. The agent holds a resource stock, and opportunities to spend resources arise randomly according to a Poisson process. When the deadline is far away, the agent smooths consumption, but as the deadline approaches, the agent prioritizes current spending because of uncertainty about the future. The combination of concave utility and the agent's liquidity induces correlation aversion. Connecting the agent's risk and time preference is intuitive and leads to a model of procrastination where the agent overestimates their desire to spend resources.

econ.TH↗
arXiv2024

The Structure of the U.S. Income Distribution

I show that U.S. incomes follow a one-parameter family of probability distributions over more than fifty years of data. I compare statistical models of income, and I highlight the inverse-gamma distribution as a parsimonious model that matches data particularly well and has straightforward theoretical interpretations. However, despite having relatively few parameters, the inverse-gamma distribution still overfits income data. I establish a linear relationship between parameter estimates, and a one-dimensional model emerges naturally when I exploit this relationship. I conclude with theoretical remarks about the model.

econ.GN↗
arXiv2023

Nash Equilibrium Existence without Convexity

In this paper, I prove the existence of a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium for a large class of games with nonconvex strategy spaces. Specifically, if each player's strategies form a compact, connected Euclidean neighborhood retract and if all best-response correspondences are null-homotopic, then the game has a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium. As an application, I show how this result can prove the fundamental theorem of algebra.

econ.TH↗