Pinar Yildirim

I need you to slow down another 30 seconds so we can run :)

@aviceisza.bsky.social is a friend I gained over years of NBER meetings, with conversations on organizational economics and running. One NBER morning we tried to run together and he quickly dusted me off in 6min miles. If Angelino runs for this role as he runs in real life, no one stands a chance!

This will be interesting to watch

It will take a while to make Philly’s incoming WNBA team profitable.

And, not surprisingly, what will take it to sustainability will be good marketing and financial planning rather than great athletic capacity in the long term. (Of course, we want that too!)

Good luck to Philly’s new WNBA team!

Despite the growth projections, most WNBA teams currently generate annual losses.

Tennis and golf remain the two most profitable women’s sports, mostly thanks to the media deals, corporate sponsorships, and ticket sales.

As one dives into the operational reality of bringing a team to a city, it becomes clear that involvement of an NBA team is beneficial because a venue is required, and this is a big investment for any new team.

So 5 WNBA teams are owned by NBA owners, and others have various collaborations.

— avg team valuation
$3.5b vs 55m

— avg viewership per game
1.6m vs 456K (across various media)

— avg ticket cost
$94 vs 47

Some interesting numbers from this undertaking were as follows (pls take them with a grain of salt, as most numbers came from personal interviews):

NBA vs WNBA:

— Avg salary of a player: $9.6m vs $120K/yr

— highest paid player:
$54m vs $235K

But the moment you walk into women’s sports, you realize how challenging it is for these teams to make it. They need to be financially sustainable and compete with men’s sports for media/advertising dollars, sponsorships, fandom, and venues.

Otherwise investments become donations for a cause.

Over the past few years, I advised a group of @wharton executive MBA women who were devoted to bringing WNBA to Philadelphia.

I hoped to contribute to the transformation of the city’s economy. And I played basketball in various teams growing up, so this was a personally rewarding activity.

It is great to be part of SICSS (Summer Institute in Computational Social Science) Penn 2025, which brings together researchers from various fields. If you are a PhD student or a young faculty attending, please reach out before or after the events.

sicss.io/2025/penn/pe...

The FCC has to consider viewpoint diversity for news media outlet mergers (for good reasons). But did we see other advertising holding companies subjected to viewpoint diversity? Should we treat media-buying ad companies as a force shaping the media industry? This is a new territory.

FTC's Daniel Guarnera says “Coordination among advertising agencies to suppress advertising spending on publications with disfavored political or ideological viewpoints threatens to distort not only competition between ad agencies, but also public discussion and debate.”

What is interesting about the FTC proposed order is its restrictions that prevent the parties from "engaging in collusion or coordination to direct advertising away from media publishers based on the publishers’ political or ideological viewpoints."

The FTC gave the green light for a merger between Omnicom Media Group and IPG Mediabrands, currently the third and the fourth largest advertising agencies, to form the largest global ad agency. How this merger will impact the advertising markets and media-buying behavior are to be seen.

(4) With optimal AI adoption, some wages within a homogenous team may increase, and intra-team wage inequality may decline.

If you read the paper, please share your feedback with us.

(3) The principal may choose not to fully exhaust the AI capacity at her discretion, that is, the rate of AI adoption is not necessarily defined by the technological resource constraints.

(2) Workers at the upper-most and the lower-most ends of the line network have higher risk of being replaced.

The middle worker, being essential for the information flow, keeps his full employment.

We offer four key insights.

(1) The optimal AI strategy involves the stochastic use of AI to replace workers — varying use of AI and workers across projects or shifts, for example.

So, AI may not reduce employment at the extensive margin, even if it may do so at the intensive margin.

We develop a model where a principal introduces an AI in a sequential team work setting.

An AI has lower moral hazard risk, but depending on which worker the AI replaces, its introduction can interrupt the information flow between workers and have negative externalities.

We study these questions in a new working paper titled “Artificial Intelligence in Team Dynamics: Who Gets Replaced and Why?,” co-authored with Xienan Cheng and Mustafa Dogan.

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

What is the optimal strategy of AI deployment?

What is the effect of AI on the wages of the workers by their position?

What is the effect of AI on intra-team wage inequality?

There is no shortage of papers studying the effects of AI on worker productivity, but majority of them focus on individual workers assuming away interactions between team members.

What if AI is deployed in a team with sequential work?

Which team members would face the highest displacement risk?

@tayfunsonmez.bsky.social’s tremendous collaboration in Turkey to help kidney patients is such an impactful example of market design

The 10th Marketplace Innovation Workshop is taking place with a fantastic program and participation of leading scholars.

Very happy to open the program yesterday with a keynote, speaking broadly about the effects of technology in marketplaces and its impact on our lives.

marketplaceinnovation.net

Looking to hire a Stanford @stanfordpress.bsky.social PhD student as a research assistant for a brief period of time in the next couple weeks. Ideally someone interested in digital economy.

If you know anyone who may be a good fit, please get in touch with me.

Thank you!

Hello world!

Moved over to this space and back to updates.