Brett Hemenway Falk

Confidence 0.75 · 2 sources · last confirmed 2026-07-21

University of Pennsylvania. Co-author, with Gerry Tsoukalas (Boston University), of “The AI Layoff Trap” (arXiv:2603.20617) — a task-based game-theoretic model showing that competitive markets can trap firms in an automation arms race that destroys the consumer demand every firm depends on, even when every individual firm foresees the collective harm. First named in the wiki (as “Brett Falk”) on BBC’s “New Normal with Katty Kay” episode popularizing the paper, though he was not himself interviewed; promoted to an entity page once the underlying paper gave him a second source.

Appears in this wiki via

• 2026-07-20-bbc-researchers-studied-ai-layoffs-heres-their-warning — named as co-author of the paper Tsoukalas discusses; not himself a speaker in the episode.
• 2026-06-03-falk-tsoukalas-the-ai-layoff-trap — the paper itself: a formal demand-externality result, a six-instrument policy comparison, a reversal case (fast/high-paying reemployment flips the externality), and a post-labor limit where the corrective problem itself dissolves into a purely distributional one.