Assistant Professor & Boquist-Meyer Faculty Fellow
Business Economics and Public Policy
Kelley School of Business at Indiana University
Contact
Email: dbasak@iu.edu
Address: HH3080, 1309 E. Tenth Street,
Bloomington, IN 47405
A panic is an event in which a crisis occurs not because of weak fundamentals but because of strategic uncertainty (for instance, a bank run or sovereign debt default). In such problems, the players do not always act at the same time, and this can be an effective tool for persuasion. We study this problem from a dynamic adversarial information design perspective and find practical policies to reduce such panics.
Panics and Early Warnings (with Zhen Zhou), JPE
How does a timely alert about the impending disaster eliminate panic?
Diffusing Coordination Risk (with Zhen Zhou), AER
How do asynchronous moves help in coordination?
Frequent Stress Tests (with Mayur Choudhary and Zhen Zhou), work in progress
How does conducting more stress tests help?
We study bargaining games, where an underlying state (such as public opinion) determines the cost of compromise for the players and possible uncertainty about the state. We provide rational explanations for some widely observed but unexplained phenomena. We also analyze the efficiency implications.
Gambling over Public Opinion (with Joyee Deb), AER
Why do political parties wait and see which way the public opinion moves before agreeing, and how does it affect welfare?
Does a small probability of being uninformed make a large difference in bargaining?
Does more information about a player improve social welfare in bargaining?
Aspiration and Bargaining (with Urmee Khan), working paper
Why is there often a disparity between public expectations and outcomes of political bargaining?
Algorithms steer different individuals to different news and video content based on personal characteristics, thus affecting the informational similarity across people and their behavior. We propose an order of information similarity and characterize how information similarity affects incentives in strategic environments.
Similarity of Information in Games (with Joyee Deb and Aditya Kuvalekar), under review
Is more similar information equivalent to better coordination?
Similarity of Information and collective action (with Joyee Deb and Aditya Kuvalekar), AER R&R
When does information similarity facilitate/impede collective action?
Optimal Tax under Dispersed and Distorted Beliefs (with Yunhui Zhao), under review
When a social planner gets new information, what changes should be made to the corrective tax?
Learning, Externality, and Optimal Financial Regulation (with Yunhui Zhao), JFS R&R
When does financial tranquility call for stringent regulation?
Alliance Acquisition and Excludability (with Krishnamurthy Subramanian), work in progress
When assets are non-excludable, which ownership structure is more efficient - alliance or acquisition?