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 ]

Monetizing digital content with network effects: A mechanism-design approach (with Pascal Pillath)  
[ arXiv , AI-generated podcast ]

We design profit-maximizing mechanisms to sell an excludable and non-rival good with positive and/or negative network effects. Buyers have heterogeneous private values that depend on how many others also consume the good. In optimum, an endogenous number of the highest types consume the good, and we can implement this allocation in dominant strategies. We apply our insights to digital content creation, and we are able to rationalize features seen in monetization schemes in this industry such as voluntary contributions, community subsidies, and exclusivity bids.

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.

Confidence in Strategy-Proof Matching Mechanisms (with Müge Süer, Michel Tolksdorf, and Sokol Tominaj) [slides]

Contrary to classical theory, we provide experimental evidence that preference reports in a strategy-proof school-choice mechanism systematically depend on beliefs. We employ a "hard-easy gap" to exogenously vary students' beliefs about their priority rank. As predicted, underconfidence induces more manipulation and thus more justified envy than overconfidence. The effect of priority information on justified envy crucially depends on the initial beliefs and the real priority ranks: while top students always gain, non-top students lose from this information. In total, correcting overconfidence/underconfidence increases/decreases justified envy. Finally, we confirm that additionally providing information on school availability through a dynamic implementation of the mechanism reduces justified envy compared to priority information alone.

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.

Competing for strategic buyers 

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. 

Upcoming and recent presentations: 

Monetizing digital content with network effects

MaCCI 2025, Mannheim

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

Greater Bay Area Market Design Workshop 2023, Macau

Confidence in Strategy-Proof Matching Mechanisms
European Workshop on Market Design 2025, Mannheim
Conference on Economic Design 2025, Essex