Publications 

"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

"Leader-Follower Dynamics in Shareholder Activism" (with Gonzalo Cisternas, Aaron Kolb, and S. "Vish" Viswanathan) (2025) Revised & Resubmitted Journal of Finance

We propose a theory of coordination and influence among blockholders without explicit agreements. Privately informed activists trade in sequence to control block-acquisition costs. Through this timing of trades, leader activists use order flows to create trading gains that entice other activists to build larger blocks, ultimately causing those followers to bear greater activism costs that add value. Trading activists can thus differ dramatically from “pure insiders” as in Kyle (1985), for whom price impact is the sole disciplinary force: not only do such leaders accumulate shares differently than if acting in isolation—or if firms’ true values were exogenous—but their trades end up having predictability. We explain how this fundamental departure in the nature of strategic trading relates to free-rider problems affecting governance, and how it produces price abnormalities analogous to those documented empirically. We also uncover how interdependence in some form of private information—activists’ blocks, firms’ fundamentals, or intervention costs—can be a key catalyst for the mechanism uncovered.

"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

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

"Knowledge Transfers" (with Chiara Margaria, Tatiana Mayskaya and Arina Nikandrova)

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