Mikhail Galashin

Job Market Paper

Market for Answers: Integrating Сommunity Information in Research Design (with Alena Buinskaya)

We propose a framework for survey design as a market interaction. In our model, respondents choose answer options closest to their true beliefs, forming demand, while crowdsourced contributors supply options under both monetary and non-monetary incentive schemes. This framework yields two theoretically grounded metrics for evaluating the quality of answer sets for multiple-choice questions: (1) consumer surplus, measured as the semantic similarity between the chosen option and the respondent's true beliefs, and (2) market share, defined as the probability of selecting any option from the set. We propose a method for estimating demand that leverages text embeddings, a recent advance in natural language processing. To validate the model, we conduct an experiment and find that the demand model successfully predicts respondent choices. On the supply side, we find that while monetary incentives improve crowdsourced options, supplier characteristics—particularly their own beliefs about the question of interest—play a larger role. Our results suggest that selecting an appropriate crowdsourcing population may be more important than incentive design for obtaining high-quality survey options.

Working Papers

Macroeconomic Expectations and Credit Card Spending (with Martin Kanz and Ricardo Perez-Truglia)
accepted for publication at Review of Financial Studies

We examine how macroeconomic expectations affect consumer decisions, using an experiment with 2,872 credit card customers at a large commercial bank. In the experiment, participants are randomized into receiving expert forecasts of inflation and the nominal exchange rate. We find that forecasts significantly affect inflation and exchange rate expectations, but do not change spending or self-reported consumption plans as predicted by standard models of intertemporal choice. Results from a supplementary survey experiment suggest that consumers are sophisticated enough to anticipate nominal rigidities and reduce spending on durables for precautionary reasons, counteracting the effects predicted by standard models of intertemporal optimization.

Work in progress

Personal Experiences and Research Agendas (with Natalia Lamberova)

Professional Degrees and Labor Market Outcomes (with Aleksandr Gevorkian and Olga Novikova)

Pre-Ph.D. papers:

Teamwork Efficiency and Company Size (with Sergey V. Popov)
The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics, January 2016