Research

Publications:

Report-dependent utility and strategy-proofness,  Management Science 69(5), 2023, pp. 2733--2745. [slides] 

Loss aversion in strategy-proof school-choice mechanisms (with Jonas von Wangenheim), Journal of Economic Theory 207, 2023, 105588. [ arXiv , talk CMID 2020 ]

Deterministic mechanisms, the revelation principle, and ex-post constraints (with Felix Jarman), Economics Letters 161, 2017, pp. 96--98

Ex-post optimal knapsack procurement (with Felix Jarman), Journal of Economic Theory 171, 2017, pp. 35--63

Working Papers and work in progress: [SSRN profile, arXiv ]

Competing for strategic buyers  [ new version coming ]

Although revenue-management markets are rarely monopolistic, this assumption is typically made in the literature. In this paper, multiple sellers in total offer K identical goods to n>K buyers with private persistent valuations. Goods are traded  in continuous time before some deadline. All buyers enter the market simultaneously, are fully forward-looking and do not discount. I find a payoff-unique equilibrium in which allocations, prices and payoffs are equivalent under monopoly and oligopoly, if and only if a monopolist (with or without commitment power) optimally sells her capacity with probability one. All sellers set identical prices that jump after each sale and otherwise descend continuously. There is no incentive to undercut competitors' prices, because each seller anticipates that, by letting her rivals sell out, she will become a monopolist. If sellers can commit to future prices, the largest seller depletes her capacity at last, and, for fixed K, industry profits increase in her capacity. 

Unraveling in oligopolistic revenue management with myopic consumers 

Several capacity-constrained sellers offer scarce homogeneous goods. They do not discount, and have many price posting opportunities before a deadline. Long-lived consumers arrive at given times, and immediately accept prices below their i.i.d. valuations. A monopolist can extract full surplus by descending prices along the type space once all consumers have entered. In contrast, oligopolistic sellers compete for the highest types and, thereby, leave a competition rent to consumers. In equilibrium, smaller competitors deplete their capacities at martingale prices such that the largest seller becomes a monopolist. Trading activity is preponed to before all consumers are present to mitigate competition. This unraveling benefits sellers, but introduces an allocative inefficiency at the cost of consumers arriving later. 

Monetizing digital content with network effects (with Pascal Pillath)

We design the profit-maximizing monetization scheme for a monopolistic digital content creator. She sells an excludable and non-rival good that is produced at a fixed cost. Users have heterogeneous private values that depend on how many users consume the content. Moreover, this audience size maps into additional creator profits, reflecting additional business opportunities.  We show that the optimal allocation excludes low-type users, but may include otherwise unprofitable types that are solely included for their network value. We suggest an implementation in which users may voluntarily pay more than others or even subsidize them to make content provision to a larger audience more likely.

How to get advice from reputation concerned experts: A mechanism design approach (with Amir Habibi and Tobit Gamp)

We examine how a decision maker (DM) should organize the communication with experts who are only concerned about improving their own reputation rather than helping her per se. Employing a mechanism design approach, we consider all possible ways how this communication could be organized. We characterize when the expert's reputation concerns prevent the DM from learning the information necessary to make a first best choice. We show that when the first best is not achievable, then it is never optimal for the DM to meet with the experts privately. She obtains better results when she uses a communication protocol where the experts engage in a debate but the DM is left in the dark about the contribution of each expert towards the final recommendation.

Work in progress:

Dormant papers:

School choice and loss aversion [SSRN]: This paper became "Loss aversion in strategy-proof school-choice mechanisms," but we left it online since we had to remove the dynamic remedy mechanism. The typo in the proof of Proposition 2, corrected in the published paper, was spotted by Ofer Glicksohn.

Upcoming and recent presentations: 

Monetizing digital content with network effects

Lisbon Game Theory Meetings 2023, Lisbon

How to get advice from reputation concerned experts: A mechanism design approach

Greater Bay Area Market Design Workshop 2023, Macau
University of Hong Kong
Theory Workshop at CERGE-EI, Prague