Bio

I was born in Chicago, Illinois, and moved out to Orange County, California, for college. I am a master’s student at Chapman University’s Economic Science Institute in economic systems design. My area of research involves the study of exchange systems and price mechanisms, especially with the use computational models. My recent interest has been in the area of pricing mechanisms in the technology sector, specifically mobile applications and computing services. I am currently working on computing Bayesian Nash Equilibria in first-price combinatorial auctions. My thesis is based on a series of laboratory experiments testing these equilibrium results.

Project: Wolfram iOS App Sales Analysis

While many business people and academics discuss mobile application markets, data on iOS app sales is not made available to the general public. This creates the need to develop models to estimate mobile app sales from publicly available data such as user app ratings or reviews that Apple makes available. These models may be poor indicators of app sales, because users can download the apps without rating them. We test these models using data gathered from publicly available sources on Wolfram’s iOS data sales in western countries. We test the “rating count” model’s prediction on two sets of data. First, we scrape data off of the US Apple site for all Wolfram apps, we collect the top 20 (ranked by number of comments) Wolfram apps, and we compare them to app sales internationally. Second, we compare the number of reviews for Wolfram|Alpha in the different western countries in our dataset. We then analyze three models found in the literature or developed for this analysis for robustness and explanatory power.