Working Papers

Policy-advising competition and endogenous lobbies, with Daniel Habermacher. SSRN Working Paper, March 2024. 

A general framework of Bertrand competition between experts in which both transfers and expertise are means to influence policy. We show how lobbying may occur because of competition.

A theory of media bias and disinformation. SSRN Working Paper, October 2023. 

In a model of media bias that captures several stylized facts about today’s (digital) news industry, we investigate the effect of competition on disinformation and consumer behavior.

From prejudice to racial profiling and back: A naïve intuitive statistician’s curse, with Dominik Karos. Center for Mathematical Economics Working Paper 644, February 2021. 

We show how racial profiling may be both the cause and the consequence of common racial prejudices.

Publications

Strategic transmission of imperfect information: why revealing evidence (without proof) is difficult. International Journal of Game Theory, 52, 1291-1316, 2023, doi:10.1007/s00182-023-00848-1. 

We show that soft evidence is more prone to manipulation than one might think and provide a rationale for simple grade ratings.

Believe me, I am ignorant, but not biased, with Achim Voss. European Economic Review, 149, 2022, doi:10.1016/j.euroecorev.2022.104262.  

Can a biased government exploit the benefit of the doubt and pass as ignorant but neutral in order to get re-elected?

Shadow links, with Ana Mauleon and Vincent Vannetelbosch.  Journal of Economic Theory, 197, 2021, doi:10.1016/j.jet.2021.105325.

A novel solution concept for network formation games with public and private links.

Casting doubt: Image concerns and the communication of social impact, with Joel J. van der Weele. The Economic Journal, 131, 2887-2919, 2021, doi:10.1093/ej/ueab014.

An earlier version of this paper has circulated under the title “Persuasion, justification and the communication of social impact”.

Do subjects misrepresent their information about the social returns to prosocial actions?

Dynamics of strategic information transmission in social networks. Theoretical Economics, 14, 253-295, 2019, doi:10.3982/TE3056.

A framework of strategic information transmission through cheap talk in a social network.

Finite languages, persuasion bias, and opinion fluctuations. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 149, 46-57, 2018, doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2018.03.001.

How does communication via finite languages affect opinions when agents are subject to persuasion bias?

Trust and manipulation in social networks, with Ana Mauleon and Vincent Vannetelbosch. Network Science, 4, 216-243, 2016, doi:10.1017/nws.2015.34.

What is the role of manipulation when agents are subject to persuasion bias?

Anonymous social influence, with Michel Grabisch and Agnieszka Rusinowska. Games and Economic Behavior, 82, 621-635, 2013, doi:10.1016/j.geb.2013.09.006.

A framework of social influence with anonymous influence processes, which only depend on how many agents share an opinion. 

Unpublished Papers (partly incorporated in later work)

Denial and alarmism in collective action problems, with Joel J. van der Weele, March 2018.

Strategic communication under persuasion bias in social networks, May 2015.

Distorted Voronoi languages, with Frank Riedel, December 2011.