Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Rising Star Paper Prize
This award, sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, is for best paper by a graduate student presented in a Rising Star sessions and is presented at the annual International Industrial Organization Conference.
2026 Recipient
Qian Wang, University of Maryland
“Innovation Path Choices in China's Electric Vehicle Battery Industry”
This paper examines whether market-driven innovation follows the socially optimal path when firms face competing technologies with different cost structures. Wang estimates a dynamic structural model of the Chinese EV battery industry in which suppliers choose between Lithium-Ion-Ferro-Phosphate (LFP) and Nickel-Cobalt-Manganese (NCM) chemistries, the former being a relatively low marginal cost technology for which improvements in energy density are costly, and the latter being a higher marginal cost technology for which improvements in energy density are less costly. The analysis reveals that market-driven innovation over-invests in NCM: a social planner would more aggressively pursue the lower marginal cost (but high sunk cost) LFP technology. The paper shows that R&D subsidies are likely more effective than consumer subsidies at correcting this distortion.
Past Recipients
2025
Marguerite Obolensky (Columbia University), for “Protect or Prepare? Crop Insurance and Adaptation in a Changing Climate”
2024
Anran Li (Northwestern University), for "Commitment, Competition, and Preventive Care Provision"
2023
Pierre Bodéré (New York University), for “Dynamic Spatial Competition in Early Education: an Equilibrium Analysis of the Preschool Market in Pennsylvania”
2022
Kwok Hao Lee (Princeton University) and Leon Musolff (Princeton University), for “Entry into Two-Sided Markets Shaped by Platform-Guided Search”
2021
Joao Vitor Granja de Almeida (University of Pennsylvania), for “Regulation and Service Provision in Dynamic Oligopoly: Evidence from Mobile Telecommunications”
2020
Claudia Allende (Columbia University), for “Competition Under Social Interactions and the Design of Education Policies
2019
Cailin Slattery (University of Virginia), for “Bidding for Firms: Subsidy Competition in the U.S.”
2018
Mons Chan, (University of Minnesota), for “How Substitutable are Labor and Intermediates?”
2017
Christoph Walsh (Boston University), for “Liberalizing the Airwaves in Ghana: A Dynamic Structural Model of Radio Station Competition”
2016
Elena Prager (University of Pennsylvania), for “Tiered Hospital Networks, Health Care Demand, and Prices”
2015
Andrew Butters (Northwestern University), for “Demand Volatility, Adjustment Costs, Temporal Aggregation, and Productivity”
2014
Yair Taylor (Duke University), for “Patent Breadth versus Length: An Examination of the Pharmaceutical Industry”
2013
Garrett Johnson (University of Rochester), for “The Impact of Privacy Policy on the Auction Market for Online Display Advertising”
2012
The first Best Rising Star Paper prize was awarded to Lai Jiang (New York University), for “The Welfare Effects of Bill Shock Regulation in Mobile Telecommunication Markets”