About me

My name is Kiran Dwivedi and I am currently working as a Pre-Doctoral Research Assistant with the EconCS team at Microsoft Research New England. I earned a BA in Economics and History from the University of Oxford and before joining Microsoft Research, I completed a MA in Economics at Columbia University.

My research interests span a variety economic fields, reflecting my varied experiences working in the discipline. I am particulary interested in studying those predictive algorithms that have come to underpin recent technological advancements and their effects on adjacent marketplaces. Fast improving, Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 will require large amounts of high-quality data if they are produce desirable outputs. How the market for such data will evolve is one of the questions I am keen on exploring.

I have also been exploring the related field of Mechanism Design. I am particularly interested in procurement auctions under uncertainty and in the presence of capacity constraints. Energy markets are a particularly interesting case study in this regard; in Europe as elsewhere, energy grid operators must procure energy from capacity-constrained producers who can attempt to anticipate real-time energy demand by using predictive algorithms. Studying even the simplest version of this "game" yields meaningful insights into the incentives of the "players".

Finally, I have longstanding fascination with the Economics of Innovation. I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the diffusion of roller-milling technologies in the USA and have since continued to be passionate about those questions concerning the production and adoption of novel technologies. More topical (perhaps) than the proliferation of roller-mills in the 1880s is the growing importance of open-source software in the tech industry. I am keen to understand those conditions that make it profitable for individuals (and increasingly firms) to contribute to open-source projects.