Alex Alekseev

🥳 Stoked to share that our paper with Christina Strobel, "A Taxonomy of Al Experiments," has been accepted at the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics!

Huge thanks to Christina for collab and to the reviewers for extremely helpful feedback!

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

#EconSky

My Game Christmas Tree. What's on yours?

If you are on the market and it feels tough, know this. You are amazing. You have come this far, be proud of yourself. Rejection hurts, but you are not your rejection. Know your worth, shine your light.

I guess people do it all the time when they control for risk aversion. Personal example: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
I use risk preferences to predict behavior in another task. They don't)

Congratulations!!

This tip will be helpful for anyone who uses Beamer-made slides (or any PDF slides in fact) with a dual-screen setup, where the slides are projected on a big screen from a laptop in extended display mode. And who cares about their neck.

aalexee.com/post/2025-11...

Plugging in the duck race numbers, n=6000, k=100, m=3, we get about a 5% chance of winning.
We didn’t win, but on the plus side it was the most rubber ducks I’ve ever seen 🦆

Clearly, what changes here is the number of non-winning combinations. If you buy m tickets, then this number is "n-m choose k". And then we compute the probability of winning as before, although it does not simplify nicely.

Let’s start slow. Suppose there are four tickets (A,B,C,D). But now assume that you bought tickets A and B. There are still six possible combinations of two tickets: AB, AC, AD, BC, BD, CD. But now five of them lead to a prize, hence the probability of winning is 5⁄6.

What if you bought more than one ticket, though? What is the probability of having at least one ticket win? It cannot be simply the sum of probabilities of a single ticket winning.

Applying the formula to the duck race, we get a probability of winning, p = 100⁄6000, about 2%.

Then the number of winning combinations is the difference between the total number of combinations and the number of non-winning combinations. After some algebra, it turns out that the probability of winning is simply k/n.

But what is the number of winning combinations? It seems that it is easier to find the number of non-winning combinations. This is just the total number of combinations of k elements that do not include our ticket: "n-1 choose k".

It is easy to see the pattern. If there are n tickets in total and k randomly chosen tickets win, the total number of possibilities, which is the number of combinations of k elements from the set of n elements, is simply "n choose k".

Now suppose there are 4 tickets (A,B,C,D). Again, you have A, two tickets win.
Possible pairs are: AB, AC, AD, BC, BD, CD.
You win in three pairs, hence the chance of winning is 1/2

Suppose there are 3 tickets (A,B,C). You have A. Two tickets win.
All possible pairs are AB, AC, BC.
You win in two cases, hence the probability of winning is 2/3.

If 1 ticket wins out of 6,000, and you bought 3 tickets, your chance of winning is 3/6000.
But what if 100 tickets win? That’s less obvious. Let's build intuition through simple examples

🦆 Last weekend, Regensburg hosted a duck race. 6,000 rubber ducks drifting through a canal. Each duck corresponds to a lottery ticket. The first 100 ducks to finish win prizes. We bought 3 tickets. What are our odds of winning?
➡️ Read more: aalexee.com/post/2025-10...

Thanks so much for the support!

Thrilled to see my paper "The (Statistical) Power of Incentives" out at the Journal of the Economic Science Association. 🥳

Read it here (open access) 👉 dx.doi.org/10.1017/esa....

#Econsky

Inspired by this amazing graphic that I found at a ramen place in Brno

How to participate in an ESA meeting

Step 1. Attend plenary talks
Step 2. Attend sessions
Step 3. Attend social events
Step 4. Meet new people and catch up with old friends
Step 5. Oh no, the conference is over
Step 6. Lie down
Step 7. Try not to cry
Step 8. Cry a lot

@ecscienceassoc.bsky.social

Big thanks to @fialalenka.bsky.social and @i4replication.bsky.social for the replication games in Brno. It was fun. We loved the songs! 🤘

👏 Huge thanks to @milosfisar.bsky.social and the team at @econmuni.bsky.social for a fantastic @ecscienceassoc.bsky.social meeting in Brno

#econsky

iOS autocorrects “tex” as “Tex”
It autocorrects “xetex” as “XeTeX”
It does not autocorrect “latex”

Can you guess what it autocorrects as “listed”?

🤔

🎉 Excited to share that my paper "The (Statistical) Power of Incentives" has been accepted at the Journal of the Economic Science Association! @ecscienceassoc.bsky.social

Thanks to everyone who helped me on this journey.

ssrn.com/abstract=408...

#EconSky

Remember, your .tex file is just text. Use any editor you like. Dedicated LaTeX editors are great for typesetting, but you can use other editors.

Share your LaTeX writing tips below! 👇

Personalize. Choose a font you love (not just a default), and find a theme that feels right.

Next, adjust your editor's line width. A narrower column (80 chars) is way easier to read than a full-screen line.

First, ditch the split-screen. Close that PDF preview while you're writing. Focus on the words, not the layout.