Photo by Vanessa Coleman
Katja Hofmann
I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Economics at Stanford University.
I'm an empirical IO economist, with applications in market design and health economics.
My advisors are
Liran Einav,
Neale Mahoney,
Maya Rossin-Slater, and
Shoshana Vasserman.
I am on the 2025-26 academic job market.
You can reach me at khofmann@stanford.edu.
Working papers
Consumer Welfare and Misallocation in Panic Buying of Gasoline Job Market Paper
with Kate Reinmuth · [pdf]
Abstract
Panic buying describes a sudden, unanticipated surge in demand, triggered by a real or perceived disruption. In anticipation, consumers front-load purchases, thereby congesting the market and raising the risk of shortages. When prices are slow to adjust, non-price rationing emerges, with ambiguous effects on allocative efficiency across heterogeneous consumers. We study the welfare and allocative effects of panic buying in the context of a two-week episode of panic buying of gasoline in the UK. We combine novel data on station wait times and card transactions to study two sources of welfare loss: elevated shopping costs and misallocation. We develop a model in which heterogeneous consumers trade off the benefit from refueling, given their belief about future fuel availability, against endogenously determined shopping costs. Compared to the optimal allocation, we find substantial losses in status-quo consumer surplus driven by misallocation as front-loading consumers crowded out those with emptier gas tanks. We evaluate alternative allocation rules and their potential in mitigating these losses.