Robert Gazzale, PhD

Associate Professor, Teaching Stream

Associate Chair, Undergraduate Studies

Department of Economics

University of Toronto

Contact Me

Max Gluskin House 330 (map)

150 St. George Street; Toronto ON M5S 3G7; Canada

416.978.2123

robert.gazzale@utoronto.ca

Teaching

Courses I Teach

Fall 2020

ECO101: Principles of Microeconomics. University’s calendar entry. Registered students may access the course website in Quercus, the University of Toronto’s online teaching and learning environment. Syllabus from 2018.

Office Hours

To be determined.

Reference Letters

If your reference form only requires your current grade and a signature, do not submit a formal request. Please just give me the form during office hours or before or after class.

If you would like me to write a reference letter or complete a form that requires more information than just your current grade, you must submit a formal request. Please follow the instructions below.

I teach a lot of students. I want to provide reference letters that are informative. As a result, if you would like me to complete a reference form or write a reference letter, please email me the following at least 4 weeks before the first due date.

Personal Information
  1. Your name as it appears on UofT records.
  2. Your student ID number.
  3. A photo. (I am better with faces than names.)
Our History

For each course you took with me, please list:

  1. The course.
  2. When you took the course.
  3. Your final grade.
References Requested

For each reference form (or letter of recommendation recipient), please provide:

  1. Institution.
  2. Department.
  3. Degree program.
  4. Due date.
  5. Electronic or paper. (If paper, you must provide all forms and envelopes.)
Supporting Documents
  1. Most recent transcript.
  2. A draft of any personal statement you will be submitting.

The Most Important Part

In approximately one to two paragraphs, please answer the following question: What do I believe Gazzale can say on my behalf?

Rationale: The first thing the admissions committee is going to do is look at your transcript. This means that if the only information I can provide is the grade that you earned in my course, my reference is worthless. I would thus love your perspective on the value added by my reference. You should definitely assume that I do not remember anything, so please do remind me about that great conversation we had about Uber's surge pricing, the topic of your great essay, or how you came to live in office hours after that disappointing term test result.

Research

Working Papers

“I'll cross that bridge if I get to it: Focusing on the Near Future,” with Lina Walker. (PDF.) Subject instructions: PDF. (Experiment 2 previously circulated as “Behavioral Biases in Annuity Choice: An Experiment.”)

“Learning to Play Nash from the Best.” (PDF.)

“Giving Gossips Their Due: Information Provision in Games with Private Monitoring.” (PDF.)

Publications

“A Shared Sense of Responsibility: Money versus Effort Contributions in the Voluntary Provision of Public Goods,” with Jared C. Carbone. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Volume 139, 2017, pages 74–87. (PDF of working paper version.)

“Testing motives for charitable giving: A revealed-preference methodology with experimental evidence,” with Rahul Deb and Matthew J. Kotchen. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Volume 120, December 2014, pages 181–192. (PDF version.)

“Ambiguous Solicitation: Ambiguous Prescription,” with Julian Jamison, Alexander Karlan and Dean Karlan. Economic Inquiry, 51(1), January 2013, pages 1002–1011. (PDF of working paper version.)

“Remain Silent and Ye Shall Suffer: Seller Exploitation of Reticent Buyers in an Experimental Reputation System,” with Tapan Khopkar. Experimental Economics, 14(2), May 2011, pages 273–285. (Available here. PDF of working paper version.)

“User cost, usage and library purchasing of electronically-accessed journals,” with Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason. In Wendy Lougee and Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason, eds., Economics and usage of digital libraries: byting the bullet. University of Michigan Scholarly Publishing Office, 2008. (Available here.)

“When Does Learning in Games Generate Convergence to Nash Equilibria? The Role of Supermodularity in an Experimental Setting” with Yan Chen. The American Economic Review, 94(5), December 2004, pages 1505–1503. (PDF of earlier version.)

“Improving Learning Performance by Applying Economic Knowledge,” with Christopher H. Brooks, Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason and Edmund H. Durfee. In Peyman Faratin, David C. Parkes, Juan A. Rogríquez-Aguilar & William E. Walsh, eds., Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce V: Designing Mechanisms and Systems. Springer Verlag, 2004. (PDF of earlier version.)

“Model Selection in an Information Economy: Choosing What to Learn,” with Christopher H. Brooks, Rajarshi Das, Jeffrey O. Kephart, Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason and Edmund H. Durfee. Computational Intelligence, 18(4), 2002, pages 566–582. (PDF of earlier version.)

“Pricing and Bundling Electronic Information Goods: Evidence from the Field,” with Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason and Juan F. Riveros. In Ingo Vogelsand & Benjamin M. Compaine, eds., The Internet Upheaval. MIT Press, 2000. (PDF of earlier version.)

Refereed Conference Papers

“Endogenous Differentiation of Information Goods under Uncertainty,” with Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason. Proceedings of the 2001 ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce. ACM Press, October 2001. (PDF of subsequent version.)

“Pricing Information Bundles in a Dynamic Environment,” with Jeffrey O. Kephart, Christopher H. Brooks, Rajarshi Das, Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason and Edmund H. Durfee. Proceedings of the 2001 ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce. ACM Press, October 2001. (PDF of earlier version.)

“Information Bundling in a Dynamic Environment,” with Christopher H. Brooks, Rajarshi Das, Jeffrey O. Kephart, Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason and Edmund H. Durfee. Proceedings of the IJCAI-2001 Workshop on Economic Agents, Models and Mechanisms. (PDF of earlier version.)

About Me

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