Research

Publications / forthcoming

"Information Choice in Auctions", forthcoming at American Economic Review  [Online Appendix]

The choice of an auction mechanism influences which object characteristics bidders learn about and whether the object is allocated efficiently. Some object characteristics are valued equally by all bidders and thus are inconsequential for the efficient allocation. Others matter only to certain bidders, and thus determine the bidder with the highest valuation. I show when the second-price auction is ex-ante efficient by inducing bidders to seek socially relevant information. When facing a continuous learning trade-off, bidders learn more about socially relevant components and less about common characteristics of the object in a second-price auction than a first-price auction.

"Local Evidence and Diversity in Minipublics", with Arjada Bardhi, Journal of Political Economy, August 2023 (131) [Online Appendix]

A policymaker selects a minipublic:  a group of citizens from a demographically diverse citizenry with access to local evidence about the impact of a policy. Citizens face uncertainty about the policymaker’s eventual policy bias, which is shown to discourage the most marginally informative minipublic citizens from discovering their evidence. We fully characterize the optimal minipublic composition. Relative to the most demographically representative minipublic, the optimal minipublic overrepresents demographics at the margins of the citizenry while underrepresenting those around the median citizen. The representativeness of the optimal minipublic varies nonmonotonically with uncertainty. Our findings bear practical implications for minipublic design.

"Optimal Group Testing with Heterogeneous Risks", with Ying Chen and Hülya Eraslan, Economic Theory, June 2023

We consider optimal group testing of individuals with heterogeneous risks for an infectious disease. Our algorithm significantly reduces the number of tests needed compared to Dorfman (1943). When both low-risk and high-risk samples have sufficiently low infection probabilities, it is optimal to form heterogeneous groups with exactly one high-risk sample per group. Otherwise, it is not optimal to form heterogeneous groups, but homogeneous group testing may still be optimal. For a range of parameters including the U.S. Covid-19 positivity rate for many weeks during the pandemic, the optimal size of a group test is four. We discuss the implications of our results for team design and task assignment.

"Two-Dimensional Information Acquisition in Social Learning", with Helene Mass, Journal of Economic Theory, June 2022 (202)  

We analyze a social learning model where the agents’ utility depends on a common component and an idiosyncratic component. Each agent splits a learning budget between the two components. We show that information about the common component is fully aggregated if and only if agents do not have to sacrifice learning about their idiosyncratic component in order to learn marginally about the common component. If agents vary in how much they value their idiosyncratic component, then the order of agents can strictly impact how much information is aggregated.

"Asymmetric Budget Constraints in a First-Price Auction", Journal of Economic Theory, March 2020 (186)

I solve a first-price auction for two bidders with asymmetric budget distributions and known valuations for one object. I show that in any equilibrium, the expected utilities and bid distributions of both bidders are unique. If budgets are sufficiently low, the bidders will bid their entire budget in any equilibrium. For sufficiently high budgets, mass points in the equilibrium strategies arise. A less restrictive budget distribution could make both bidders strictly worse off. If the budget distribution of one bidder is dominated by the budget distribution of the other bidder in the reverse-hazard-rate order, the weaker bidder will bid more aggressively than the stronger bidder. In contrast to existing results for symmetric budget distributions, with asymmetric budget distributions, a second-price auction can yield a strictly higher revenue than a first-price auction. Under an additional assumption, I derive the unique equilibrium utilities and bid distributions of both bidders in an all-pay auction.

Working Papers

"Persuading an Informed Committee", with Saskia Klein 

A biased sender seeks to persuade a committee to vote for a proposal by providing public information about its quality. Each voter has some private information about the proposal's quality. We characterize the sender-optimal disclosure policy under unanimity rule when the sender can versus cannot ask voters for a report about their private information. The sender can only profit from asking agents about their private signals when the private information is sufficiently accurate. For all smaller accuracy levels, a sender who cannot elicit the private information is equally well off. 

"Learning to Persuade Buyers"

I study how a seller, who is uncertain about her quality, can persuade a sequence of agents to buy her product. Agents are privately and imperfectly informed about the quality.  Learning only from private information and actions of past agents, the seller becomes informed over time and uses her informational advantage to induce future agents to buy her product. If private information of agents is sufficiently accurate, it is too costly for the seller to persuade pessimistic agents. Instead, she extracts all information rent from the optimists, no matter how much she has learned so far. If private information is sufficiently noisy, the seller first extracts all information rent from the optimists, as this requires little knowledge about the quality of the product. When she has gathered sufficient information, the seller changes her disclosure regime to focus on the pessimists, and grants information rents to the optimists.

Work in Progress

"Two-Dimensional Information Choice in Committees"

"Full Surplus Extraction with Information Choice"