Article:Brett Hemenway Falk, Gerry Tsoukalas
The AI Layoff Trap: Why Competition Traps Firms in Excessive Automation
A theoretical economics paper by Brett Hemenway Falk and Gerry Tsoukalas models why rational firms cut more jobs with AI than is collectively optimal. A demand externality drives the trap: each firm captures all the cost savings from automation but absorbs only a fraction of the resulting demand loss, shifting the rest onto competitors.