Scholars@Duke
David McAdams

David McAdams

Professor of Business Administration
Fuqua School of Business
david.mcadams@duke.edu
Box 90120, Durham, NC 27708-0120
Fuqua School of Business, Durham, NC 27708

Selected Publications

What are the key features of an equitable global vaccine strategy for the next pandemic? A qualitative study of pandemic control experts.

Journal Article Vaccine · August 2025 BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic exposed significant weaknesses in global health multilateralism, particularly in its failure to achieve fair and equitable global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. Soon after vaccines were available, huge inequitie ... Full text Cite

Games of Strategy

Book · June 10, 2025 Invites all students to understand game theory ... Cite

Adoption epidemics and viral marketing

Journal Article Theoretical Economics · May 1, 2025 An innovation (e.g., new product or idea) spreads like a virus, transmitted by those who have previously adopted it. Agents update their beliefs about innovation quality based on private signals and when they hear about the innovation. We characterize equi ... Full text Cite

The political economy of epidemic management

Journal Article Review of Economic Design · February 1, 2025 During an infectious-disease epidemic, a political leader imposes “stay-at-home orders” (limiting activity) or “go-out orders” (mandating activity) whenever preferred by the majority of the citizenry over the no-intervention status quo. We characterize the ... Full text Cite

The economics of epidemics: introduction to the special issue, part two

Journal Article Review of Economic Design · February 1, 2025 Full text Cite

Uniting disciplines against antimicrobial resistance (AMR): highlights from a multidisciplinary inaugural AMR summit.

Journal Article Antimicrobial stewardship & healthcare epidemiology : ASHE · January 2025 Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) poses a significant global health threat, projected to cause 10 million deaths annually by 2050. Addressing AMR requires a coordinated, multidisciplinary approach encompassing infectious disease (ID) clinicians, pharmacists, ... Full text Cite

Steady-State Social Distancing and Vaccination

Journal Article American Economic Review: Insights · March 1, 2024 This paper analyzes an economic-epidemiological model of infectious disease where it is possible to become infected more than once and individual agents make endogenous choices of social distancing and vaccine adoption. Protective actions adopted ... Full text Cite

Equilibrium social activity during an epidemic

Journal Article Journal of Economic Theory · January 1, 2023 During an infectious-disease epidemic, people make choices that impact transmission, trading off the risk of infection with the social-economic benefits of activity. We investigate how the qualitative features of an epidemic's Nash-equilibrium trajectory d ... Full text Cite

Learning through the grapevine and the impact of the breadth and depth of social networks.

Journal Article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · August 2022 We study how communication platforms can improve social learning without censoring or fact-checking messages, when they have members who deliberately and/or inadvertently distort information. Message fidelity depends on social network depth (how many times ... Full text Cite

The economics of managing evolution.

Journal Article PLoS biology · November 2021 Humans are altering biological systems at unprecedented rates, and these alterations often have longer-term evolutionary impacts. Most obvious is the spread of resistance to pesticides and antibiotics. There are a wide variety of management strategies avai ... Full text Cite

Adapting environmental surveillance for polio to the need to track antimicrobial resistance.

Journal Article Bulletin of the World Health Organization · March 2021 Full text Cite

The Blossoming of Economic Epidemiology

Journal Article Annual Review of Economics · January 1, 2021 Infectious diseases, ideas, new products, and other infectants spread in epidemic fashion through social contact. The COVID-19 pandemic, the proliferation of fake news, and the rise of antimicrobial resistance have thrust economic epidemiology into the for ... Full text Cite

Antibiotic development - economic, regulatory and societal challenges.

Journal Article Nature reviews. Microbiology · May 2020 Full text Cite

Viral Social Learning

Journal Article · April 1, 2020 Cite

Games of Strategy

Book · February 21, 2020 Comprehensive, clear, and approachable, with clever real-world examples that motivate students ... Cite

Resistance diagnostics as a public health tool to combat antibiotic resistance: A model-based evaluation.

Journal Article PLoS biology · May 2019 Rapid point-of-care resistance diagnostics (POC-RD) are a key tool in the fight against antibiotic resistance. By tailoring drug choice to infection genotype, doctors can improve treatment efficacy while limiting costs of inappropriate antibiotic prescript ... Full text Cite

Empirical work on auctions of multiple objects

Journal Article Journal of Economic Literature · March 1, 2018 Abundant data has led to new opportunities for empirical auctions research in recent years, with much of the newest work on auctions of multiple objects, including: (1) auctions of ranked objects (such as sponsored search ads), (2) auctions of identical ob ... Full text Cite

Supply, Demand, and Uncertainty: Implications for Prelisting Conservation Policy

Journal Article Ecological Economics · July 1, 2017 The Endangered Species Act (ESA) faces a shortage of incentives to motivate the scale of conservation activities necessary to address and reverse the decline of at-risk species. A recent policy proposal attempts to change this by allowing landowners to gen ... Full text Cite

Analysis of the potential for point-of-care test to enable individualised treatment of infections caused by antimicrobial-resistant and susceptible strains of Neisseria gonorrhoeae: a modelling study.

Journal Article BMJ open · June 2017 ObjectiveTo create a mathematical model to investigate the treatment impact and economic implications of introducing an antimicrobial resistance point-of-care test (AMR POCT) for gonorrhoea as a way of extending the life of current last-line treat ... Full text Cite

Resistance diagnosis and the changing economics of antibiotic discovery.

Journal Article Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · January 2017 Point-of-care diagnostics that can determine an infection's antibiotic sensitivity increase the profitability of new antibiotics that enjoy patent protection, even when such diagnostics reduce the quantity of antibiotics sold. Advances in the science and t ... Full text Cite

Resistance diagnosis and the changing epidemiology of antibiotic resistance.

Journal Article Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · January 2017 Widespread adoption of point-of-care resistance diagnostics (POCRD) reduces ineffective antibiotic use but could increase overall antibiotic use. Indeed, in the context of a standard susceptible-infected epidemiological model with a single antibiotic, POCR ... Full text Cite

On the benefits of dynamic bidding when participation is costly

Journal Article Journal of Economic Theory · May 1, 2015 Consider a second-price auction with costly bidding in which bidders with i.i.d. private values have multiple opportunities to bid. If bids are observable, the resulting dynamic-bidding game generates greater expected total welfare than if bids were sealed ... Full text Cite

Identification of first-price auctions with non-separable unobserved heterogeneity

Journal Article Journal of Econometrics · January 1, 2013 We propose a novel methodology for identification of first-price auctions, when bidders' private valuations are independent conditional on one-dimensional unobserved heterogeneity. We extend the existing literature (Li and Vuong, 1998; Krasnokutskaya, 2011 ... Full text Cite

Strategic ignorance in a second-price auction

Journal Article Economics Letters · January 1, 2012 Suppose that bidders may publicly choose not to learn their values prior to a second-price auction with costly bidding. All equilibria with truthful bidding exhibit bidder ignorance when the number of bidders is sufficiently small. Ignorance considerations ... Full text Cite

Performance and turnover in a stochastic partnership

Journal Article American Economic Journal Microeconomics · November 1, 2011 Suppose that players in a stochastic partnership have the option to quit and rematch anonymously. If stage-game payoffs are subject to a persistent initial shock, the (unique) social welfare-maximizing equilibrium induces a "dating" process in which all pa ... Full text Cite

Carbon allowance auction design: An assessment of options for the United States

Journal Article Review of Environmental Economics and Policy · January 1, 2011 Carbon allowance auctions are a component of existing and proposed regional cap-and-trade programs in the United States and are also included in recent proposed bills in the U.S. Congress that would establish a national cap-and-trade program to regulate gr ... Full text Cite

Mechanism choice and strategic bidding in divisible good auctions: An empirical analysis of the turkish treasury auction market

Journal Article Journal of Political Economy · October 1, 2010 We propose an estimation method to bound bidders' marginal valuations in discriminatory auctions using individual bid-level data and apply the method to data from the Turkish Treasury auction market. Using estimated bounds on marginal values, we compute an ... Full text Cite

Discounts for Qualified Buyers Only

Journal Article Economic Research Initiatives at Duke Working Paper · May 10, 2010 Cite

Partial identification and testable restrictions in multi-unit auctions

Journal Article Journal of Econometrics · September 1, 2008 Bidders' values in discriminatory and uniform-price auctions are not necessarily point-identified under the assumptions of equilibrium bidding and independent private values, but meaningful policy analysis can proceed from bounds on bidder values. This pap ... Full text Open Access Cite

On the failure of monotonicity in uniform-price auctions

Journal Article Journal of Economic Theory · November 1, 2007 Except for well-studied special cases in which bidders have single-unit demand or bidders are risk-neutral with independent private values, equilibria of uniform-price auctions with private values need not possess familiar monotonicity properties. In parti ... Full text Open Access Cite

Who pays when auction rules are bent?

Journal Article International Journal of Industrial Organization · October 1, 2007 In many negotiations, rules are soft in the sense that the seller and/or buyers may break them at some cost. When buyers have private values, we show that the cost of such opportunistic behavior (whether by the buyers or the seller) is borne entirely by th ... Full text Cite

Uniqueness in symmetric first-price auctions with affiliation

Journal Article Journal of Economic Theory · September 1, 2007 The first-price auction has a unique monotone pure strategy equilibrium when there are n symmetric risk-averse bidders having affiliated types and interdependent values. © 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ... Full text Open Access Cite

Adjustable supply in uniform price auctions: Non-commitment as a strategic tool

Journal Article Economics Letters · April 1, 2007 In some uniform-price auctions, the auctioneer decides how much to sell after the bidding. Auctioneer expected profit and social welfare can each be strictly higher in all equilibria given such "adjustable supply" than in all equilibria given any fixed qua ... Full text Cite

Credible sales mechanisms and intermediaries

Journal Article American Economic Review · March 1, 2007 We consider a seller who faces several buyers and lacks access to an institution to credibly close a sale. If buyers anticipate that the seller may negotiate further, they will prefer to wait before making their best and final offers. This in turn induces ... Full text Open Access Cite

Monotonicity in asymmetric first-price auctions with affiliation

Journal Article International Journal of Game Theory · February 1, 2007 I study monotonicity of equilibrium strategies in first-price auctions with asymmetric bidders, risk aversion, affiliated types, and interdependent values. Every mixed-strategy equilibrium is shown to be outcome-equivalent to a monotone pure-strategy equil ... Full text Cite

Perverse incentives in the Medicare prescription drug benefit.

Journal Article Inquiry : a journal of medical care organization, provision and financing · January 2007 This paper analyzes some of the perverse incentives that may arise under the current Medicare prescription drug benefit design. In particular, risk adjustment for a stand-alone prescription drug benefit creates perverse incentives for prescription drug pla ... Full text Cite

Monotone equilibrium in multi-unit auctions

Journal Article Review of Economic Studies · October 1, 2006 In two-sided multi-unit auctions having a variety of payment rules, including uniform-price and discriminatory auctions, a monotone pure-strategy equilibrium (MPSE) exists when bidders are risk neutral with independent multi-dimensional types and interdepe ... Full text Cite

Uniform-Price Auctions with Adjustable Supply

Journal Article · 2006 form-price auction with adjustable supply, the seller decides how much to sell after receiving the bids so as to maximize its ex post profit. Given N bidders and adjustable supply, all equilibria of the uniform-price auction lead to price on order 1/N3 bel ... Open Access Cite

Internal Markets for Supply Chain Capacity Allocation

Journal Article · 2005 explores the possibility of solving supply chain capacity allocation problems using internal markets among employees of the same company. Unlike earlier forms of transfer pricing, IT now makes it easier for such markets to involve many employees, finegrain ... Open Access Cite

Isotone equilibrium in games of incomplete information

Journal Article Econometrica · January 1, 2003 An isotone pure strategy equilibrium exists in any game of incomplete information in which each player's action set is infinite sublattice of multidimensional Euclidean space, types are multidimensional and atomless, and each player's interim expected payo ... Full text Open Access Cite

Modifying the uniform-price auction to eliminate ‘collusive-seeming equilibria’

Journal Article · 2002 The uniform-price auction is used in many regional electricity procurement auctions and its “collusive-seeming equilibria” have been linked to potential exercise of market power. Such equilibria do not exist, however, if a small amount of cash is split amo ... Open Access Cite

Speeding up ascending-bid auctions

Journal Article Ijcai International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence · December 1, 1999 In recent years auctions have grown in inter-est within the AI community as innovative mechanisms for resource allocation. The primary contribution of this paper is to identify a family of hybrid auctions, called survival auctions, which combine the benefi ... Cite

Nonparametric Identification of Auction Models with Non-Separable Unobserved Heterogeneity

Scholarly Edition We propose a novel methodology for nonparametric identification of first-price auction models with independent private values, which accommodates auction-specific unobserved heterogeneity and bidder asymmetries, based on recent results from the econometr ... Cite

Carbon Allowance Auction Design: An Assessment of Options for the United States

Journal Article Review of Environmental Economics and Policy Carbon allowance auctions are a component of existing and proposed regional cap-and-trade programs in the United States and are also included in recent proposed bills in the U.S. Congress that would establish a national cap-and-trade program to regulate ... Cite