Ayush Gupta

Welcome! I’m a fifth year PhD student in the economics department at Boston University. My research focuses on organization economics, social learning, and game theory.

Research

Incentives, Supervision, and Limits to Firm Size PDF

This paper studies how incentive problems affect the size and structure of a firm (or any other organization) with one principal and many agents. We develop a model in which worker effort, supervision, and wages are determined endogenously. Our model generalizes much of the existing literature by making minimal assumptions about the production technology and the nature of supervision. Using a novel optimization technique, we establish necessary and sufficient conditions for the size of a firm to not be limited by incentive problems. We show that firms are limited to a positive, but finite, number of workers under reasonable assumptions. Firm size is unbounded only when worker productivity is sufficiently greater than the dis-utility of effort.

Teaching

Course Instructor

Introduction to Financial Economics (Undergraduate) - Harvard University (Spring 2025)

Teaching Fellow

Microeconomic Theory (Masters) - Boston University (Fall 2024)

Introductory Microeconomics (Undergraduate) - Boston University (Spring 2022; Fall 2022)

Economics of Less Developed Regions (Undergraduate) - Boston University (Fall 2021)

Economics of Sports (Undergraduate) - Boston University (Fall 2021)

Game Theory (Undergraduate) - University of Toronto (Fall 2017)

Intermediate Macroeconomics (Undergraduate) - University of Toronto (Summer 2017)

Contact

Email guptaayu [at] bu.edu