PUBLICATIONS

Policy-advising Competition and Endogenous Lobbies (with Manuel Foerster). Journal of Public Economics, 2025. Vol. 245, 105354. Pre-print.

Authority and Specialization under Informational Interdependence. RAND Journal of Economics, 2025. Vol. 56 (4), pp. 562-586. Pre-print.

WORKING PAPERS

Workplace Diversity, Information Acquisition and Moral Hazard (with Nicolás Riquelme). Submitted.

Abstract: We study how workplace diversity affects organizational performance when information acquisition and implementation effort are decentralized. A manager acquires information to guide project selection, while a worker decides on effort to implement it. We measure diversity as the gap between their ex-ante beliefs about the best project for the organization, which is selected based on both perspectives. The worker can respond to new information by exerting effort, in which case greater diversity improves performance only when managerial information is sufficiently precise and worker beliefs carry enough weight in project selection. Crucially, these benefits hinge on informational transparency and credibility: they vanish when acquisition is covert because the signaling value of becoming informed disappears, and they erode under strategic communication, where credibility concerns depend on information quality. Our analysis speaks to the backlash against diversity, highlighting the need for complementary processes that secure high-quality managerial information and transparency over its sources.

Authority, Communication, and Internal Markets (with Manuel Foerster). Submitted.

Abstract: We revisit the trade-off between keeping authority and granting decision-making rights to an informed agent. We introduce transfers, allowing the agent to charge a fee for her services, but she may also offer the principal a side payment. The principal's equilibrium contracting decision maximizes the aggregate payoff. In particular, introducing transfers changes the contracting decision from centralization to delegation and improves efficiency if delegation maximizes the aggregate payoff but requires a side payment. We then introduce general delegation mechanisms. We first show that the agent, behaving ex ante like a social planner would do, restricts the discretion of her interim self in equilibrium. We then derive the optimal delegation set and show that delegation is more prevalent but less intense in equilibrium. Our results contribute to the debate over subsidiary governance in multinational corporations, showing how financial intermediation by headquarters can induce the parties to act in the organization's interest.

Beneficial Congestion and Two-sided Information in Multidimensional Cheap Talk.

Abstract: A principal takes multiple interdependent decisions and consults biased experts who privately observe information about the relevant states and communicate through state-specific cheap-talk messages. A single piece of information bears on several decisions, and this interdependence creates a credibility loss: an expert is tempted to distort the decisions he can influence using information he cannot credibly transmit. We show the expert's temptation is proportional to the decision-maker's residual uncertainty about the withheld state; therefore, the information she is expected to decide with governs experts' communication incentives. In particular, information about a state an expert withholds reduces the credibility loss and improves communication, whereas information about a state he is willing to reveal crowds out and can impair communication. Notably, the mechanism is agnostic to the source of the decision-maker's information, such that she may optimally acquire signals purely as a communication instrument—paying for information whose cost exceeds its decision value to buy what cannot be communicated and to be told what can. Sustaining this behavior requires that the acquisition of information is observable, working as a commitment device both to pay for the signal that makes her expert credible and to abstain from the signal that would make him redundant.

WORK IN PROGRESS

Entry, differentiation and market integration: the case of asymmetric industries (with Sébastien Mitraille)

Cheap Talk with Moral Hazard (with Nicolás Riquelme)

A Theory of Policy Influence (with Manuel Foerster)