Erik Postnieks

Current research

I study how autonomous agents, firms, and institutions optimize when consequential system effects remain outside their objective functions. My work combines economic theory, reproducible computational experiments, institutional analysis, and working research tools.

Current public work examines blind spots in payoff-based analysis, system-welfare measurement, and accountable decision design. The assumptions, methods, publication status, and available public evidence are collected on the publications page.

I also developed Decision Accounting, a management approach for creating permanent, reconstructable records of consequential decisions so organizations can review what was decided and learn from outcomes.

How I work

I translate an economic or governance question into a specified model, a reproducible computational environment where appropriate, a documented result, and an inspectable public artifact. The public papers state their methods and limitations; supporting evidence is linked when it is publicly available.

The work brings economic reasoning and research engineering into one process: specify the question, build the testbed, identify controls, preserve failed hypotheses, and report what the evidence supports.

Earlier career

Erik Postnieks holds a B.A. in Economics from Cornell University and an M.B.A. from the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College (1993). At Cornell he studied under Richard Thaler and, at twenty-two, co-authored “The Smart Crash of October 19th” (Harvard Business Review, 1988) with Avner Arbel and Steven Carvell.

His career spans quantitative finance and technology investing. At Bankers Trust Company in New York, he structured derivatives and co-managed a derivatives-product portfolio. He later founded Parametric Capital Management, a multi-strategy quantitative investment manager, and Wooster Asset Management, where he managed the Portage family of G10 currency funds.

The discipline of recording what was known, predicted, rejected, and accepted before outcomes became part of the intellectual foundation for Decision Accounting.

Research collaboration

I welcome defined research collaborations with universities, research institutes, public institutions, standards bodies, companies, counsel, and experienced expert teams. Relevant fields include computational economics, welfare economics, multi-agent systems, institutional design, AI evaluation, and auditable decision infrastructure.

A collaboration should state its question, evidence requirements, expected outputs, authorship, publication terms, confidentiality terms, and permitted uses before work begins.

Contact

Research, institutional, and professional inquiries: erik@decisionaccounting.org

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