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)
We consider a novel mechanism design problem and characterize the best mechanism for a bidder with any given value among all non-discriminatory mechanisms (those that implement symmetric social choice functions).
We show that the organizer should always subsidize the participation of agents in economic activity when the participation costs are verifiable. We also characterize the optimal subsidization policy.
Management Science, Forthcoming
We introduce the new concept of a flexible reserve price such that the value of the reserve price that the winner has to pay may depend on the losing bids. We show that a second-price auction with the properly chosen flexible reserve price is the optimal mechanism among all non-discriminatory mechanisms (those that implement symmetric social choice functions).
International Journal of Game Theory, 2024
Bauer (2023) claims to have constructed an auction format that maximizes buyers' welfare. We note that his characterization is incomplete because it does not precisely specify the payment rule. Because of that, the discussion following this proposition is misleading and the mechanism proposed in the example is not incentive compatible. The complete characterization of the optimal mechanism is the one from 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. This result crucially relies on their notion of dominant strategy, which is used in the game theory literature and is stronger than the one traditionally used in the mechanism design literature. We show that this result is not true if the (weaker) standard notion of dominant strategy is employed, and there exist asymmetric SCFs such that they can be implemented in a dominant strategy equilibrium of a symmetric mechanism.
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 affirmative action policy. We show that it is possible to restore efficiency in the case of two contestants and not possible with more contestants.
RAND Journal of Economics, 2022
This paper was awarded with the Outstanding Research Award given by the China Information Economics Society
We discuss whether and how the organizer of 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 better than no information disclosure. Moreover, combined with the optimal prize choice, full information disclosure implements the first-best levels of effort in equilibrium.
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, whether 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 (principal) can (and wants to) provide a compensation contract to an auctioneer (agent) to prevent any corruption between the auctioneer and 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. Using values for bundles generated based on the Travelling Salesman Problem, we show that a Walrasian equilibrium in linear prices often exists. Therefore, frequently there is no need to consider more complicated auctions involving non-linear prices.
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 for valuations derived from a simple logistics problem, the Traveling Salesman Problem. We find that bidders’ valuations typically violate even very elementary requirements, but these violations affect only a limited number of request bundles.
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.