I am doing research in Game Theory (Mathematical Models of Multi-agent Interactive Decision Making) and its applications to Economics, using theoretical and experimental methods. Most of my research focuses on dynamic processes of learning and evolution in games. I am a member of Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics (CeDEx) and of Economic Theory Centre (UNET) at the School of Economics, University of Nottingham.
Currently I am working on investigating, theoretically and experimentally, behavior and beliefs in various classes of games, including corruption games, bargaining games with incomplete information, mechanisms under partial information, and market mechanisms. The following projects are works in progress.
"Attribution of Responsibiliy for Corrupt Decisions" (with Montero, M., Verbel, Y.)
We investigate experimentally how victims or bystanders of collusive corruption (offering and accepting a bribe) judge those involved. Corrupt decision-makers labeled as public officials are judged more harshly than those laveled as citizens, and those accepting are somewhat more harshly than those offering a bribe. Bystanders judge almost as harshly as victims if the context of corruption is clear, while much less harshly if the decision is presented as a purely redistributive one. [Paper (June 2025)] [Experiment Instructions] [Supplementary Materials]
"On Unbeatable Strategies in Games"
The paper considers the definition of unbeatability of a strategy in a game as a strategy that gets a player a payoff that is not lower than (not beaten by) payoff(s) of other player(s). It defines different strengths of unbeatability (unbeatability-for-sure, unbeatability-in-expectation, unbeatability-on-average) and illustrates these concepts in economic games. For two-player finite games, it is shown that an unbeatable-in-expectations strategy always exists for at least one player. For n-player symmetric aggregative games, sufficient conditions for existence of unbeatable strategies are provided. [Paper (November 2024)]
"Minority Protection in Voting Mechanisms - Experimental Evidence" (with Engelmann, D., Grüner, H.P., Hoffmann, T.), R&R for European Economic Review
In an experiment, individuals can suggest one of the threshold voting rules after receiving information about the distribution of possible valuations for the alternatives but their own valuation is not yet realized. Depending on the skewness of a distribution, different threshold are optimal in the sense of expected payoffs. We find that individuals change their proposed rules in the direction predicted by the skewness of the distribution but not perfectly, due to the presence of individuals who react to distribution changes differently. [Paper (September 2024)] [Online Appendix]
"Private Value Bargaining with Communication: Does Cheap-Talk Lead to Efficiency?" (with Saran, R.)
In a setting with a seller and a buyer having private information about their cost or valuation, we run an experiment in which we allow face-to-face communication before traders set bid/ask in a double auction. Even though a fully efficient equilibrium exists in this setting, full efficiency is not always achieved in the experiment. Although many traders use "dyadic" strategies of revealing cost/valuation and agreeing on the middle price, some players try to exploit these strategies, leading sometimes to a breakdown in trade. [Paper (December 2022)] [Experiment Materials]
"Strategic Sophistication, Lying Costs, and Learning in Private Value Bargaining"
For a double auction with a seller and a buyer having private information about their cost or valuation, the paper considers learning from low levels of strategic sophistication. Simulation of experience-weighted attraction learning, especially with added costs of deviating from cost or valuation, are able to reproduce many features of experimental results both with continuous and with discrete distributions of costs/valuations. [Paper (December 2020)]
"The Emergence of Loyalty in a Market Model" (with Kopányi, D.)
We consider an agent-based model of a market with buyers and sellers. Buyers can choose which seller to go to and sellers can decide whether to treat preferentially more frequent buyers. We find that buyers' loyalty to particular sellers emerges even if sellers treat more frequent buyers unfavorably. We also observe, somewhat counterintuitively, that allowing sellers to price discriminate and to treat buyers differentially leads to lower average profit for sellers. [Paper to be made available soon.]
See the Publications page for details of publications and links to published or pre-print versions of papers.