Research

Fields:  microeconomic theory, information economics, organizational economics.

Published / forthcoming:

  1. Political Accountability Under Moral Hazard (with Avidit Acharya and João Ramos), AJPS
  2. Persuasion via Weak Institutions (with Doron Ravid and Denis Shishkin), JPE
  3. Goodwill in Communication (with Aditya Kuvalekar and João Ramos), JET
  4. Addressing Strategic Uncertainty with Incentives and Information (with Marina Halac and Daniel Rappoport), AEA P&P  [slides]
  5. Optimal Attention Management: A Tractable Framework (with Laurent Mathevet and Dong Wei), GEB
  6. Pooled Testing for Quarantine Decisions (with Doron Ravid), JET
  7. Rank Uncertainty in Organizations (with Marina Halac and Daniel Rappoport), AER  [slides]
  8. Cheap Talk with Transparent Motives (with Doron Ravid), Econometrica  [slides]
  9. Repeated Delegation (with João Ramos), JET  [slides]
  10. Job Insecurity (with Aditya Kuvalekar), AEJ: Micro
  11. Attention Management (with Laurent Mathevet and Dong Wei), AER: Insights  [slides]
  12. Peer-Confirming Equilibrium (with Evan Sadler), Econometrica  [slides]
  13. Disclosure to a Psychological Audience (with Laurent Mathevet), AEJ: Micro

Unpublished:

  • Predicting Choice from Information Costs (with Doron Ravid), abstract in EC ’23

    An agent acquires a costly flexible signal before making a decision. We explore to what degree knowledge of the agent’s information costs helps predict her behavior. We establish an impossibility result: learning costs alone generate no testable restrictions on choice without also imposing constraints on actions’ state-dependent utilities. By contrast, choices from a menu often uniquely pin down the agent’s decisions in all submenus. To prove the latter result, we define iteratively differentiable cost functions, a tractable class amenable to first-order techniques. Finally, we construct tight tests for a multi-menu data set to be consistent with a given cost.

  • Buying from a Group (with Aditya Kuvalekar and Nima Haghpanah), abstract in EC ’21, R&R @ AER

    A buyer trades with a group of sellers whose heterogeneous willingness to trade is private information. She must trade with all sellers or none and must offer sellers identical terms of trade. We characterize the optimal mechanism: trade occurs if and only if the buyer’s benefit of trade exceeds a weighted average of sellers’ virtual values. These weights are endogenous, with sellers who are ex ante less inclined to trade being given greater influence. This mechanism always outperforms posted-price mechanisms, using the entire profile of sellers’ values to set the terms of trade. An extension characterizes the entire Pareto frontier.

  • Fostering Collaboration (with Joyee Deb and Aditya Kuvalekar), R&R @ TE

    We study a basic trade-off that organizations face: competition versus collaboration. Maintaining competing approaches provides option value when the best choice is uncertain. Collaborating on a single approach prevents inefficient use of resources. We model project development and selection by a principal interacting with two agents who prefer their respective project. Opposed interests undermine agents’ incentive to collaborate, causing inefficiencies. We show a time-varying threshold rule is uniquely optimal: the principal selects the first project to achieve a sufficient lead. The optimum entails initial competition, always followed by permanent collaboration. Our proof uses new martingale methods applying weak solutions.

  • Perfect Bayesian Persuasion (with Doron Ravid and Denis Shishkin)

    A sender commits to an experiment to persuade a receiver. Accounting for the sender’s experiment-choice incentives, and not presupposing a receiver tie-breaking rule when indifferent, we characterize when the sender’s equilibrium payoff is unique and so coincides with her “Bayesian persuasion” value. A sufficient condition in finite models is that every action which is receiver-optimal at some belief is uniquely optimal at some other belief—a generic property. We similarly show the equilibrium sender payoff is typically unique in ordered models. In an extension, we show uniqueness generates robustness to imperfect sender commitment.

  • The Production and Consumption of Social Media (with Apostolos Filippas and John Horton), abstract in EC ’22, R&R @ MS

    We model social media as collections of users producing and consuming content. Users value consuming content but, due to scarce attention, they may not value all content from other users. Users also value receiving attention, creating the incentive to attract an audience by producing valuable content, but also through attention bartering—users mutually becoming each others’ audience. Attention bartering shapes substantially the patterns of production and consumption on social media, explains key features of social media behavior and platform decision-making, and yields sharp predictions that are consistent with data we collect from #EconTwitter.

  • Equivalence of Cheap Talk and Bayesian Persuasion in a Finite Continuous Model

    This note confirms a conjecture posed by Françoise Forges concerning sender-receiver games of cheap talk with finite parameters. I show that, if the sender’s value function is continuous, then she can attain in equilibrium the same payoff as under communication with commitment.

  • Knowing the Informed Player’s Payoffs and Simple Play in Repeated Games (with Takuma Habu and Doron Ravid), R&R @ JET

    We revisit the classic model of two-player repeated games with undiscounted utility, observable actions, and one-sided incomplete information, and further assume the informed player has state-independent preferences. We show the informed player can attain a payoff in equilibrium if and only if she can attain it in the simple class of equilibria first studied by Aumann, Maschler, and Stearns (1968), in which information is only revealed in the game’s initial stages. This sufficiency result does not extend to the uninformed player’s equilibrium payoff set.

  • Simplifying Bayesian Persuasion (with Laurent Mathevet)

    In Bayesian Persuasion (Kamenica and Gentzkow (2011)), the sender’s optimal value is characterized by a concave envelope. Since concavification of a general function is notoriously difficult, we propose a method to reduce the problem, using the underlying economic structure of the indirect expected utility. The key observation is that one can find, using the receiver’s preferences alone, a small set of posterior beliefs on which some optimal information policy must be supported. This simplifies, sometimes dramatically, the search for optimal information.

In progress: