Mobile internet has brought a disruptive innovation to the ride-hail industry. The technology introduced by Uber, referred to as e-hail, matches passengers with drivers through their smart phones, while integrating transaction and feedback in a single app. In comparison to taxis hailed off street, or street-hail (s-hail hereafter), e-hail has...
In everyday conversations, listeners need to rapidly perceive and parse speech input as they receive it. While listeners with normal hearing may do this with relative ease, this is a multi-step process that requires listeners to recognize individual speech sounds as meaningful then integrate them to understand and respond almost...
Scholars of early-twentieth-century Buenos Aires—an international theatre hub— disproportionately emphasize Spanish-language performances. This tendency erases the histories of immigrant performing artists, such as Yiddish-speaking Jews who fled en masse to Argentina in order to escape rising antisemitism in Europe and Russia. By focusing on Yiddish theatre in Buenos Aires, this...
Information policies are an effective way to alleviate information asymmetries, but the effectiveness of such policies depends critically on the underlying incentives people face. This dissertation is comprised of three papers that study the welfare effects of various information policies using game-theoretic models. The first paper analyzes how networks of...
Iron is an essential nutrient and is critical for cellular growth and metabolism. Here, we delineate a novel mechanism by which iron alters amino acid homeostasis and mTOR activity by remodeling the cellular epigenetic landscape. We find that iron deficiency inactivates Jumonji-C domain containing histone-demethylases, resulting in histone hyper-methylation and...
Modern design practices rely more and more on computer simulations due to their low cost compared with physical experiments. However, it is still an elusive task to fully unleash the advantages of the simulation models while mitigating their disadvantages for designing complex engineering systems. In simulation-based design, computer simulation models...
This thesis contains three chapters studying the evolution of the American higher education landscape, the different forces that shaped their organization, and how they, in turn, influenced human capital accumulation. The chapters are organized into three time periods: 1850-1900, 1910-1940, and 1980-2010. In the first chapter, joint with Heyu Xiong,...
In this dissertation I examine how the government should respond to sovereign risk and show that it has implications on the optimal behavior of the government. In Chapter 1, I look into international reserve management. In Chapter 2, I analyze the effects of sovereign risk on the size of fiscal...
ABSTRACTUnderstanding Micro-macroscopic Phenomena of Tribological Fluids and Surfaces
Mechanical power and motion are transmitted through interfaces under contact and relative motion. Friction is inevitable, which can lead to higher operating and energy costs, and severe frictional rubbing can result in material damage and cessation of motion. A deep understanding of...
The work presented in this thesis is aimed at developing surface coatings for two specific applications: 1) the self-cleaning surfaces and 2) fouling control in water filtration membranes. Since all materials interact with their environment through their surfaces, tailoring surface properties by implementing surface coatings can greatly affect their performances...