Optimal Skill Diversity in Teams, joint with Tatiana Mayskaya, Vladimir Smirnov, Olivia Taylor, Andrew Wait (Accepted by Economic Theory)
Bargaining and Information Acquisition, joint with Kalyan Chatterjee and Tetsuya Hoshino, AEJ: Micro, 2025
Occupational Segregation in a Roy Model with Composition preferences, joint with Haoning Chen, Marc Henry, and Ivan Sidorov, Games and Economic Behavior, 2025
Does Reducing Communication Barriers Promote Diversity?, joint with Tatiana Mayskaya, Journal of Economic Theory, 2024
To abstain from drugs or maintain low consumption, addicts often adopt bright-line rules, i.e., rules whereby a minor lapse triggers a full relapse. To explain this, I model a quasi-hyperbolic discounter consuming an addictive good, where past use increases current marginal utility. I find that heavy past consumption inevitably traps the consumer in excessive future use. But with low past use, the consumer can—and must—adopt a bright-line rule to avoid this trap. Moreover, any Markov equilibrium without such a rule is Pareto-dominated by one that includes it. These results explain the lapse-activated consumption patterns observed in addiction.
I study strategic experimentation between two players whose experimentation efforts and outcomes are observable. Before the players begin experimenting, one player privately observes a noisy signal about the state of nature. I show that, under some conditions, welfare and the total amount of learning with such information asymmetry are higher than if the private signal were publicly revealed to both players initially. The reason is that a mutual encouragement effect arises under asymmetric information: before a breakthrough occurs, the informed player signals his private good news by persistently exerting high effort, which encourages the uninformed player to continue experimenting; the uninformed player's sustained effort, in turn, encourages the informed player to persevere.
Strategic Disclosure in Research Races, joint with Kalyan Chatterjee and Kaustav Das (R&R at Journal of Economic Theory)
Work in Progress
Shared Leadership: Strategic Experimentation with Partially Private Information, joint with Zihao Li and Yu Fu Wong