Articles

Published Papers

Information Provision in Procurement Auctions (2017) [link to pdf]

Journal of Public Economic Theory. Link to the on-line publication

We analyze the optimal provision of information in a procurement auction with horizontally differentiated goods. The buyer has private information about her preferred location on the product space and has access to a costless communication device. A seller who pays the entry cost may submit a bid comprising a location and a minimum price. We characterize the optimal information structure and show that the buyer prefers to attract only two bids. Further, additional sellers are inefficient since they reduce total and consumer surplus, gross of entry costs. We show that the buyer will not find it optimal to send public information to all sellers. On the other hand, she may profit from setting a minimum price and that a severe hold-up problem arises if she lacks commitment to set up the rules of the auction ex-ante.

Can Consumer Complaints Reduce Product Reliability? Should We Worry? (2020) [link to pdf]

Journal of Economics & Management Strategy. (Link to the on-line publication)

We analyze a monopolist's pricing and product reliability decision in a model where consumers are entitled to product replacement if the product fails, but have heterogeneous costs of exercising this right. Our main result shows that, under some conditions, a decrease in consumers expected to claim cost leads to a decrease in product reliability but an increase in profit and welfare. This result is robust to a number of extensions. Our results are in line with anecdotal evidence suggesting that changes in consumers’ claiming cost can be induced by both third parties (governments, consumers’ organizations, private enterprises, etc.) and firms. More precisely, since, under some conditions, profit and welfare align, public initiatives oriented to lower consumers’ claiming cost will be ultimately joined by firms that benefit from further increases in complaints.

Price Discrimination: Teaching New Results with Simple Exercises (2023)

Journal of Economic Education. (Link to the on-line publication)

(joint with Camilo Rubbini)

This article proposes a simple exercise of monopoly pricing to illustrate complex theoretical results on the welfare effects of group pricing. By exposing students to these exercises, we aim to bridge a gap between the standard textbook analysis of group pricing and more general results in the literature and clarify some students' misconceptions. We gear the exercise towards undergraduate students in principles- and intermediate-level economics, microeconomics, and industrial organization courses.

Discrimination against gay and trans gender people in Latin America: A correspondence study in the rental housing market

Labour Economics (link to the on-line publication)

(joint with Nicolás Abbate, Inés Berniell, Luis Laguinge, Margarita Machelett, Mariana Marchionni, Julián Pedrazzi, María Florencia Pinto)

We assess the extent of discrimination against gay and transgender individuals in the rental housing markets of four Latin American countries. We conducted a large-scale field experiment building on the correspondence study methodology to examine interactions between property managers and fictitious couples engaged in searches on a major online rental housing platform. We find no evidence of discrimination against gay male couples, but we do find strong discrimination against heterosexual couples with a transgender woman partner (trans couples). Relative to heterosexual couples, trans couples receive 19% fewer responses, 27% fewer positive responses, and 23% fewer invitations to showings. We also assess whether the evidence is consistent with taste-based discrimination or statistical discrimination models by comparing response rates when couples signal being professionals with stable jobs (quality-job signal). While we find no significant effect of the signal for heterosexual or gay male couples, trans couples benefit from providing a strong labor market signal. Their call-back, positive-response, and invitation rates increase by 25%, 36% and 29%, respectively. These results suggest that discrimination against trans couples is consistent with statistical discrimination. Moreover, we find no evidence of heterosexual couples being favored over gay male couples, nor evidence of statistical discrimination for gay male or heterosexual couples.

Working Papers

Organizational Design of Multi-Product Multi-Market Firms (2011) [link to pdf]

UC3M Economic Series 2011 Working Paper 11-22.

We seek to understand how a multi-product multi-market firm (e.g., a multinational firm) designs its optimal organizational structure. In this paper, we analyze how these two important characteristics of the firm determine the information flows within the firm, affecting its profitability and how, in turn, the firm influences these flows by allocating decision rights among its managers’ centralizing or decentralizing decision-making and designing compensation schemes. We find that, being multi-product (having to allocate a scarce resource between markets) negatively correlates organizational decisions in the different product markets. In the more profitable market, decision-making is decentralized. In the least profitable market, albeit there is a bias towards centralization, decisions are only centralized if the difference in profitability is sufficiently high. This correlation increases with the possibility of controlling resource allocation. Our paper contributes to the literature on organizational design by analyzing the case of multi-product firms. Our results are robust to different generalizations.

Product Reliability, Consumer Complaints, and Market Performance: the Case of Consumer Associations. (2011)

UC3M Economic Series 2011 Working Paper 11-21.

Working in Progress

The Economics of Transportation in Railways

Open Access in Argentinian Railways

Student Grading Schemes, Choices, and Performance (joint with Camilo Rubbini)

To Be or Not To Be the Take-it-or-leave-it Proposer

Cheap Talk vs Disclosure in Buyer-Seller Communication