Gerry Tsoukalas

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

Professor at Boston University (Questrom School of Business). Co-author, with Brett Hemenway Falk (University of Pennsylvania), 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 appeared in the wiki as the interviewee on BBC’s “New Normal with Katty Kay” episode popularizing the paper; 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 — interviewed by Katty Kay; explains the model’s headline mechanism (the “firing your customers” trap, the Odysseus-and-the-sirens framing for CEO self-restraint, the proposed tax on full AI replacement) in accessible terms.
• 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.