Nick Lee Cao

Thanks for stopping by! I'm currently working on macroeconomic topics as a PhD student at Stanford University. More on this forthcoming…

My honours thesis, written at the University of Sydney in 2018.
- The first chapter explores the Diamond paradox: that when consumers have to pay a cost to search different stores to discover their prices, no matter how small the cost (as long as it is above zero), the prevailing market price necessarily is the price that a monopolist would charge. By introducing repeat customers, I show that a price below the monopoly price can also prevail as the equilibrium outcome.
- The second chapter dispenses with the usual assumption in economics that property rights can be enforced without cost, and proves some results about the degree to which people will fund security to protect their property rights, and the profitability of expropriating others.
For non-Americans, it is also available in A4 size.
Functional Analysis notes and solutions to some exercises, mostly following David G Luenberger's Optimization by Vector Space Methods (published in 1968 and quite a difficult book to find in print now)
On my Github page, I have some LaTeX/TikZ code for drawing the decision tree of a signalling game. The end result looks like this.
Notes on the circumstances under which a partnership can be efficiently dissolved, following the Gibbons and Klemperer Econometrica paper (1987, Vol. 55, No. 3).
My Stanford profile.