About

Rakesh Vohra is a faculty member at Northwestern Engineering, serving as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is associated with the Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences at the J. L. Kellogg School of Management. His contact information includes an office located at 2169 Campus Dr., Room 548, Evanston, IL 60208-3109, and a phone number of 215-898-7701. The page indicates his involvement in engineering and management disciplines, contributing to the interdisciplinary environment of Northwestern University.

Research topics

• Economics
• Business
• Medicine
• Econometrics
• Sociology
• Microeconomics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Actuarial science
• Monetary economics
• Mathematics education
• Pedagogy
• Macroeconomics
• Finance
• Law and economics
• Risk analysis (engineering)
• Social psychology
• Demography

Selected publications

• Prophet Inequalities via Linear Programming

  Open MIND · 2026-02-07

  preprintSenior author

  Prophet inequalities bound the expected reward that can be obtained in a stopping problem by the optimal reward of its corresponding off-line version. We propose a systematic technique for deriving prophet inequalities for stopping problems associated with selecting a point in a polyhedron. It utilizes a reduced-form linear programming representation of the stopping problem. We illustrate the technique to derive a number of known results as well as some new ones. For instance, we prove a $\frac{1}{2}$-prophet inequality when the underlying polyhedron is an on-line polymatroid; one whose underlying submodular function depends upon the realized rewards. We also demonstrate a composition by the Minkowski sum property. If an $r-$ prophet inequality holds for polyhedra $P^1$ and $P^2$, it also holds for their Minkowski sum.

  DOI

• College Applications with Non-Homogeneous Application Costs

  ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation · 2026-02-03

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  A college applicant submits costly applications to a set of colleges while uncertain which colleges will admit her. If she knows the application costs, her utility of attending each college, and her probability of being admitted to each college, which subset of colleges should she apply to maximize her expected net payoff? The problem is an instance of non-monotone submodular maximization. There are two principal variants in the literature, one where the events of getting into different colleges are independent, and the other where they are correlated. The main results in the literature handle cases where all application costs are the same. We provide exact and approximate algorithms for the problem when college application costs vary.

  PublisherDOI

• Prophet Inequalities via Linear Programming

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2026-02-07

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Prophet inequalities bound the expected reward that can be obtained in a stopping problem by the optimal reward of its corresponding off-line version. We propose a systematic technique for deriving prophet inequalities for stopping problems associated with selecting a point in a polyhedron. It utilizes a reduced-form linear programming representation of the stopping problem. We illustrate the technique to derive a number of known results as well as some new ones. For instance, we prove a $\frac{1}{2}$-prophet inequality when the underlying polyhedron is an on-line polymatroid; one whose underlying submodular function depends upon the realized rewards. We also demonstrate a composition by the Minkowski sum property. If an $r-$ prophet inequality holds for polyhedra $P^1$ and $P^2$, it also holds for their Minkowski sum.

  PublisherOA PDF

• Comment on “Assignment problems with complementarities” [J. Econ. Theory 165 (2016) 209-241]

  Journal of Economic Theory · 2025-12-20

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Information Design for Many Parameters

  2025-07-02

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  A stochastic mapping from states to signals induces a distribution over possible posteriors. For a variety of purposes one is interested in parameters of these posteriors, possibly multi-dimensional, such as their quartiles or whether they first-order stochastically dominate some given distribution. Many parameters of interest can be encoded by requiring the posterior at each signal lie point-wise between two given distributions. Given a collection of these bounding pairs, one for each signal, we characterize the set of posteriors that can be realized by some stochastic mapping of states to signals. We provide applications of this result to, among others, the design of securities, price, and statistical discrimination.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Kaczynski, Steve and Scott Duke Kominers. The Everything Token: How NFTs and Web3 Will Transform the Way We Buy, Sell, and Create

  Journal of Economic Literature · 2025-03-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Rakesh Vohra of University of Pennsylvania reviews “The Everything Token: How NFTs and Web3 Will Transform the Way We Buy, Sell, and Create” by Steve Kaczynski and Scott Duke Kominers. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Explores how non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are changing the way that business is done, demonstrating the role and inevitability of NFT technology in everyday life.”

  PublisherDOI

• Costly Measurements to Incentivize Spectrum Sharing

  2025-05-12

  articleSenior author

  Connectivity services, ranging from cellular broadband to private networks and satellite communications, are driving an unprecedented demand for spectrum. However, much of the prime spectrum is locked into existing federal and scientific allocations, which often by law cannot be relocated in exchange for monetary transfer, thus making market-based reallocation strategies infeasible. We investigate a spectrum allocation mechanism that does not require monetary transfers but instead utilizes measurements that may be costly as a way to incentivize truthful reporting. We consider a scenerio involving three agents: An incumbent scientific or federal user (SFU), a commercial user (CU), and a regulator. The incumbent derives value from its current exclusive use of a spectrum band but faces increasing disutility as soon as the CU is allowed to either share the same band or use an adjacent band, while the CU benefits from gaining access. The regulator allocates spectrum based on the incumbent’s reported disutility and the CU’s utility, with provisions to verify reports and penalize dishonesty through spectrum reallocation. Our analysis demonstrates that this mechanism incentivizes truthful reporting and ensures more efficient spectrum utilization, supported by theoretical and experimental evidence on synthetic data.

  PublisherDOI

• Signaling Design

  ArXiv.org · 2025-02-04

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  We revisit the classic job-market signaling model of \cite{spence1973job}, introducing profit-seeking schools as intermediaries that design the mapping from candidates' efforts to job-market signals. Each school commits to an attendance fee and a monitoring policy. We show that, in equilibrium, a monopolist school captures the entire social surplus by committing to low information signals and charging fees that extract students' surplus from being hired. In contrast, competition shifts surplus to students, with schools vying to attract high-ability students, enabling them to distinguish themselves from their lower-ability peers. However, this increased signal informativeness leads to more wasteful effort in equilibrium, contrasting with the usual argument that competition enhances social efficiency. This result may be reversed if schools face binding fee caps or students are credit-constrained.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Optimal Bailouts in Diversified Financial Networks

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-06-18 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Widespread default involves substantial deadweight costs which could be countered by injecting capital into failing firms. Injections have positive spillovers that can trigger a repayment cascade. But which firms should a regulator bailout so as to minimize the total injection of capital while ensuring solvency of all firms? While the problem is, in general, NP-hard, for a wide range of networks that arise from a stochastic block model, we show that the optimal bailout can be implemented by a simple policy that targets firms based on their characteristics and position in the network. Specific examples of the setting include core-periphery networks.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Bayesian Bullshit

  Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design · 2024-12-15

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  A bullshitter neither knows nor cares about the truth, and therefore, it has been asserted, is more pernicious than a liar. We examine this assertion within the standard model of cheap talk communication where a bullshitter is modeled as an uninformed Sender. We show that in some circumstances, uncertainty about whether the Sender is informed or not can increase the welfare of the Receiver.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• James Schummer

  Northwestern University

  28 shared

• Randall A. Berry

  28 shared

• Michael L. Honig

  Northwestern University

  27 shared

• Sven de Vries

  25 shared

• Thành Nguyen

  Purdue University System

  24 shared

• Dean P. Foster

  18 shared

• Mallesh M. Pai

  18 shared

• Aaron Roth

  15 shared