Research

Publications

 Persuasion with Correlation Neglect: A Full Manipulation Result (with Gilat Levy and Ronny Razin) American   Economic Review: Insights 4 (1), 123-138 (2022)

 Polarized extremes and the confused centre: Campaign targeting of voters with correlation neglect (with Gilat Levy and Ronny Razin) Quarterly Journal of Political Science 10 (3), 321-355. (2021)

 Robustness of Full Revelation in Multisender Cheap Talk (with Margaret Meyer and Julia Nafziger). Theoretical Economics 14, 1203-1235. (2019)

 Stable Partitions in Many Division roblems: the Proportional and the Sequential Dictator Solution (with Gustavo Bergantiños, Jordi Massó and Alejandro Neme), Theory and Decision 79, 227-250. (2015)

 Biasing Selection Contests with Ex-Ante Identical Agents (with Kohei Kawamura), Economics Letters 123, 240-243. (2014).

 The Incumbency Effects of Signalling (with Francesco Caselli, Tom Cunningham and Massimo Morelli), Economica 81, 397-418. (2014).

On Strategy-proofness and Symmetric Single-peakedness (with Jordi Massó), Games and Economic Behavior 72, 467-484. (2011). (Published version)

Work in Progress

Socially Efficient Approval Mechanism with signaling Costs (with Evgenii Safonov)

Abstract: An agent with a privately known continuous type applies for approval. While the agent always prefers approval over rejection, approving an agent with low type has social costs. The agent sends a report about her type that she can inflate by engaging in signaling costs that have the single-crossing property. We study approval mechanisms without transfers that maximize a social welfare function that takes into consideration both the approval decision and the signaling costs of the agent. We show that threshold approval rules, which are widespread in society, are never socially optimal. By introducing some randomness in the rule, we can reduce the signaling costs without substantially changing the screening of the rule. If we further assume that the marginal cost is strictly log-supermodular, an assumption satisfied by the quadratic-loss function, we show that the optimal approval mechanism induces an approval probability that is continuous in the agent's type. We provide necessary first-order conditions for the optimal rule, and illustrate them with an analysis of the case of quadratic-loss function and uniform distribution of the agents' types.

Working Papers

Feasible Joint Distributions of Posteriors: A Graphical Approach (With Gilat Levy and Ronny Razin)

Abstract: We characterise joint distributions over posteriors that can be induced by an information structure consisting of multiple signals. This can be useful when considering information design environments in which a sender can design many, possibly correlated, experiments. Our characterisation provides a graphical necessary condition on the set of feasible distributions over vectors of posteriors, which pertains to the hypernetwork of the vectors of posteriors in the support of the distribution. We also provide two alternative transformations that will make any distribution feasible, which illustrate how positive correlation of posteriors is easier to achieve. 

Effective Signal-Jamming (with Tom Cunningham). Contact me for a copy of the paper.

Abstract: Signaling models are often used to explain certain features in the behavior of firms, politicians, and employees as attempts to persuade an observer. However it is not clear in general whether such persuasion is effective because in equilibrium the observer rationally adjusts for it. We analyse a situation in which  a privately informed agent can, with some cost, distort a signal about his information that a receiver will get before making a binary decision. We show that signal- jamming will cause a systematic change in the receiver’s choices, and the change is in favor of the sender’s preferred decision, i.e. signal-jamming is effective. We also find that the benefits of persuasion can compensate for the effort exerted by the agent. We additionally solve for the equilibrium when the receiver can commit to a threshold strategy. Even if this will eliminate persuasion, we find that the receiver is still worse off than in the case in which signal-jamming is not possible. We finally discuss applications of the model to university admissions, re-elections and limit pricing. 

 Cheap Talk with Two-Sided Private Information.

Abstract: This paper studies how the transmission of information from a biased expert to a decision maker is affected when the latter has access to an unbiased symmetric private signal. The extra information has two distinct effects on the expert's incentives to communicate. First, there is an information effect that allows the decision maker to choose a better action on expectation. This reduces the implicit cost of transmitting coarse messages and hence hampers communication. Second, there is a risk effect that arises because the extra information introduces uncertainty to the expert. For risk- averse experts, this effect increases the cost of sending coarse messages and favours communication. I show that the information effect dominates the risk effect, and for any symmetric signal structure there are always sufficiently biased experts for which communication is no longer possible in equilibrium. Moreover, for any bias of the expert, no communication is possible if the signal structure is sufficiently precise. For the uniform signal structure I show that communication decreases with the precision of the signal. Finally, I provide non degenerate examples for which the decision maker's private information cannot make up for the loss of communication implying that the welfare of both agents decreases.