Here, I provide a brief description of each of my papers and group them into several research topics:
Auctions and Mechanism Design
Contests
Corruption
Logistics
Miscellaneous
If you would like to see a list of publications in chronological order please visit the Publications page.
Auctions and Mechanism Design
This paper supersedes Favoritism in Auctions: A Mechanism Design Approach
Press coverage: nes.ru (in Russian)
Which auction format should a bidder choose if she could pick any non-discriminatory auction?
We show that the organizer of any activity should ALWAYS subsidize the participation of agents when the participation costs are verifiable.
Management Science, Forthcoming
We introduce the concept of a flexible reserve price, where the value of the reserve price that the winner must pay may depend on the losing bids, and show that the second-price auction with the optimally chosen flexible reserve price is the optimal mechanism among all non-discriminatory mechanisms.
International Journal of Game Theory, 2024
We note that the characterization of an auction format that maximizes buyers' welfare, given in Bauer (2023), is incomplete because it does not specify the payment rule precisely. The complete characterization of such an auction is given in Krishna and Perry (1998).
Journal of Mathematical Economics, 2023
Azrieli and Jain (2018) claim that a social choice function (SCF) is implemented in a dominant strategy equilibrium of a symmetric mechanism only if the SCF is symmetric. We show that this result crucially depends on their notion of dominant strategy and is not true if the standard notion of dominant strategy is employed.
On Disclosure Policies in All-Pay Auctions with Stochastic Entry (with Bo Chen and Xiandeng Jiang) [ssrn]
Journal of Mathematical Economics, 2017
We discuss whether the organizer of an all-pay auction should disclose the number of bidders to maximize the expected revenue. We show that this decision should depend on the shape of the cost function of bidders. The number of bidders should be revealed for concave costs and should be concealed for convex costs.
Contests
We investigate how head starts in innovation contests influence firms' competitive strategies and payoffs, concluding that while large head starts guarantee victory without further investment, medium-sized head starts may ultimately lead to defeat if the competition period is long, benefiting competitors instead.
B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics, 2024 (partially based on Caspar's Master Thesis)
Traditionally, affirmative action policy has been used to offset the discriminatory head starts. However, due to several recent bans of affirmative action by the US Supreme Court (Cases No. 20–1199 and No. 21–707 on June 29, 2023), this policy may not be feasible. We discuss whether it could be possible to offset such head starts by the proper contest design without an affirmative action policy.
RAND Journal of Economics, 2022
This paper was awarded with the Outstanding Research Award given by the China Information Economics Society
We discuss whether the organizer of a dynamic competition should disclose information about the results of each competitor to other competitors. We show that if the contest lasts sufficiently long, the full information disclosure is optimal.
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2017 (partially based on my Master Thesis)
I characterize the optimal prize structures in sequential elimination contests (similar to the late stages of many sports tournaments) depending on how the organizer values effort in different stages. I show that there is a very broad range of prize structures that can be optimal, including those that are non-monotone, where some of the competitors eliminated at later stages earn less in total than those eliminated at earlier stages.
Corruption
Contracts to Prevent Corruption in Auctions (with Elsa Pivard) [ssrn]
Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, Forthcoming
We show how the seller can provide a compensation contract to an auctioneer to prevent any corruption between the auctioneer and one of the bidders, even if the anti-corruption institutions are rather weak.
Economic Inquiry, 2023
Press coverage: Project Syndicate, Reprinted in: The Korea Times, The Japan Times, Mint, Bharat Times, OrissaPOST, The Independent, Informed, and others
When corruption happens, often it is the bureaucrat who benefits from corruption and not the citizen who has to pay the bribe to get the service. I show that in such cases, punishing the bureaucrats and, at the same time, rewarding the citizens for reporting corruption can be an effective anti-corruption policy.
Logistics
European Journal of Operational Research, 2025
We discuss whether carrier collaboration requires the use of combinatorial auctions or if simple auctions with linear prices are sufficient.
Properties of Bundle Valuations in Carrier Collaboration (with Daniel Rehsmann and Rudolf Vetschera)
Central European Journal of Operations Research, 2024
Many combinatorial auction mechanisms rely on certain assumptions about the valuations of bidders. We perform computational experiments to analyze to which extent these requirements are fulfilled.
Miscellaneous
Games, 2025
We provide a model to explain why most sequels are worse than the respective originals.
The Independence of Central Banks of CIS Countries and Eastern Europe (with Pavel Trunin)
Ekonomicheskaya Politika, 2010 (in Russian, based on my Bachelor Thesis)
Grilli et al. (1991) proposed an index of the central bank independence and applied it to central banks of developed countries. We compute the values of this index for CIS and Eastern European Countries.