Ali Kakhbod

Ali Kakhbod

The paper develops a decentralized resource allocation mechanism for allocating divisible goods with capacity constraints to non-price-taking agents with general concave utilities. The proposed mechanism is always budget balanced, individually rational, and it converges to an optimal solution of the corresponding centralized problem. Such a mechanism is very useful in a network with general topology and no auctioneer where the competitive agents/users want different type of services.

Ali Kakhbod, Peiyao Li

We present NoLBERT, a lightweight, timestamped foundational language model for empirical research -- particularly for forecasting in economics, finance, and the social sciences. By pretraining exclusively on text from 1976 to 1995, NoLBERT avoids both lookback and lookahead biases (information leakage) that can undermine econometric inference. It exceeds domain-specific baselines on NLP benchmarks while maintaining temporal consistency. Applied to patent texts, NoLBERT enables the construction of firm-level innovation networks and shows that gains in innovation centrality predict higher long-run profit growth.