Publications 

"Leader-Follower Dynamics in Shareholder Activism" (with Gonzalo Cisternas, Aaron Kolb, and S. "Vish" Viswanathan) Journal of Finance Forthcoming

"Exit Dilemma: The Role of Private Learning on Firm Survival" (with Chiara Margaria) AEJ:Microeconomics (2024) (Online Appendix)

"Collective Progress: Dynamics of Exit Waves" (with Can Urgun and Leeat Yariv) Journal of Political Economy (2023) (Online Appendix) 

"Renegotiation and Dynamic Inconsistency: Contracting with Non-Exponential Discounting" (with Felix Feng and Can Urgun) Journal of Economic Theory (2023) 

"Uncertainty-driven Cooperation" (with Ilwoo (Iru) Hwang and Ayca Kaya) Theoretical Economics (2020) (Best TE Paper Prize 2022)

"Implementing Equal Division with an Ultimatum Threat" (with Emin Karagozoglu) Theory and Decision (2014)

Working Papers

"Optimal Project Management" (with Alessandro Bonatti and Juuso Toikka) (2025)

We study optimal dynamic contracts for long-term projects where a risk-averse agent can influence the project's progress through hidden effort and risk choices. The optimal contract is characterized by a threshold: the principal terminates the project if progress falls below a cutoff, and adjusts incentives based on the current progress. We explore several variants of the model and results highlight the interplay between effort incentives, risk management, and optimal project resets. Our framework applies to projects with multiple solution paths, as in R&D and clinical trials, and to risky innovation environments, such as startups.

"Cutting Back to Move Forward" (with Chiara Margaria, Tatiana Mayskaya and Arina Nikandrova) (2025)

We study a dynamic model in which a principal can gradually transfer knowledge at no cost to an agent to increase his productivity. The agent exerts costly, unobservable effort to complete a task. Although knowledge sharing is efficient, a principal with commitment may deliberately limit training to deter the agent from procrastinating. Small differences in the cost of effort or the learning speed can lead to starkly different outcomes: an agent with a higher cost or slow learning rate is made minimally productive, while a slightly more efficient agent receives maximal training. We show that commitment has no value: in the principal-optimal PPE the principal trains the agent at a slow rate but achieves his commitment value. The results provide a novel rationale for inefficiently slow on-the-job training.

"Competitive Search and Moral Hazard in Dynamic Project Management" (with Mayur Choudhary and Emre Ozdenoren) (2025)

This paper introduces moral hazard in dynamic project management into a competitive search framework. In this model, agents’ unobservable actions influence the likelihood of a breakthrough. Search frictions determine agents’ outside options endogenously, affecting contract terms like tenure length and bonuses. Equilibrium tenure exceeds the benchmark with exogenously set outside options. Comparative statics reveal how search costs, degree of moral hazard, the benefits and costs of the project influence contract tenure and bonuses, offering insights into trends like declining CEO tenure and rising bonuses. We also allow the agents to have heterogeneous private valuations for success and show that separating equilibrium does not exist. In the pooling equilibrium, firms offer a menu of contracts in a single market.

"Mediation in Dynamic Contracting" (with Dino Gerardi, Lucas Maestri, and Ignacio Monzón) (2024)

We study communication in dynamic contracting with limited commitment. A firm and a worker interact over time. The worker is privately informed about his productivity. In each period, the firm offers a menu of short-term contracts. The interaction between the firm and the worker continues provided that the worker accepts a contract and finishes otherwise. We let the parties communicate through a trustworthy mediator. We allow for a class of natural and simple communication protocols (good news, bad news or both). We characterize the optimal communication protocol for the firm. We find that it is optimal to only use bad news and to reveal information gradually .

"Dynamic Signaling in Wald Options" (with Chiara Margaria) 

A sender engages in costly signaling to influence a decision maker, who observes a biased noisy signal and decides when to irreversibly take an action to match the binary state. We characterize Markov equilibria in terms of a two-dimensional boundary value problem for fixed discount rates and analyze equilibrium behavior as players become arbitrary patient. The leading example is a dynamic limit pricing game between an incumbent and a potential entrant who uses price to infer the industry conditions. A sufficiently patient incumbent always produces at capacity, and consumers can be hurt because the potential entrant strategically delays its entry.

"Efficiency in Repeated Partnerships" (2024) (Online Appendix) Revise & Resubmit Review of Economic Studies 

Two partners contribute to a common project over time. The value of the project is determined by the aggregate effort of the partners and by a common productivity parameter that each partner is privately informed about. At each instant, the two partners observe a noisy public signal of total effort. An equilibrium of this game is Markov if effort choices of agents depend only on the beliefs about the value of the project and on calendar time. I characterize the linear Markov equilibrium as the solution to a nonlinear boundary value problem. Equilibrium is unique if agents are symmetric. The equilibrium features a mutual encouragement effect, as agents exaggerate their effort in order to signal their private information, which counteracts free-riding incentives. Indeed, if the project lasts sufficiently long, the diffused information structure approximates the first-best in terms of welfare. If, instead of distributed private information, one agent has all the information about the productivity parameter, the excessive signalling effect is accentuated. As a result, the centralized information structure can yield output levels above the first best.

Work in Progress

" Regulating Pre-Election Spending: A Dynamic Analysis" (with Helios Herrera and Lucas Maestri)