I am a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Economics and Finance, Queen Mary University of London. My interests are in microeconomic theory, with a focus on mechanism design and dynamic games. 

You can find my CV here.

                  

Contact Information:                                        
School of Economics and Finance

Queen Mary University of London

Mile End Road

London E14NS

d.bhaskar@qmul.ac.uk
Research
 
Working Papers

The Value of Monitoring in Dynamic Screening.

This paper studies the use of endogenous monitoring as a screening device in long term relationships with severe adverse selection and limited commitment. A principal can hire an agent with hidden ability but strictly prefers his outside option to employing an unskilled agent. As unskilled agents find working more costly, the optimal monitoring policy screens agents by providing unskilled agents with incentives to misbehave while skilled agents work hard. Once the agent is monitored and their ability identified, the principal fires the agent if unskilled, and continues the relationship otherwise. The optimal contract involves inefficiently high monitoring by the principal after he learns that the agent is skilled. Excessive monitoring of high ability workers makes pretending to be skilled less attractive to the unskilled and allows faster screening. This highlights the key trade-off faced by the principal: providing cost-efficient incentives for skilled workers versus dismissing unskilled workers sooner. Monitoring stochastically declines over the course of the relationship.


Resource Allocation with Positive Externalities (with Evan D. Sadler). 

In several common allocation problems, transfers are unavailable, but incentives are partially aligned because the allocation to one player entails positive, though imperfect, externalities to the other. We study the extent to which a designer can exploit this alignment when allocating a budget between two players. We identify a natural mechanism, the infinite hierarchical mechanism, which partitions the type space into a countably infinite set of intervals and allocates the budget to the player in the highest interval. If both players are in the same interval, it divides the budget evenly. An appealing feature is that a designer can implement this mechanism without commitment power, and the mechanism is optimal among those implementable without commitment. Our main result shows that this mechanism remains optimal with full commitment power if the hazard rate of the type distribution is monotone, and the density is single peaked.