Research
Working papers
The status quo and belief polarization of rationally inattentive agents: theory and experiment (with Vladimir Novak and Silvio Ravaioli): American Economic Journal: Microeconomics (forthcoming)
Many real-world situations involve a choice between the implementation of a new policy with multiple possible outcomes and the preservation of the status quo. We analyze what information an inattentive agent acquires in such a binary choice problem. Specifically, we model the agent to be rationally inattentive: any information about the new policy can be acquired before the choice is made, but doing so is costly. We show how the choice of information, and thus the belief formation, depends on the agent-specific value of the status quo. Importantly, beliefs can then, in expectations, update away from the realized truth. This is due to endogenous information acquisition because the agent chooses only to learn whether the uncertain payoff is higher or lower than the payoff of the status quo. Consequently, two agents with the same prior beliefs about a new policy might become polarized if they differ in the valuations of the status quo. We show that lower cost of information leads to more severe polarization. We conduct a novel experiment to test and confirm our predicted information acquisition strategy and its dependence on the value of the status quo. In our setting with multiple states, we also replicate the well-known preference for certainty, and verify the occurrence of belief polarization.
Optimally Biased Expertise (with Pavel Ilinov, Maxim Senkov and Egor Starkov)
available here
This paper shows that the principal can strictly benefit from delegating a decision to an agent whose opinion differs from that of the principal. We consider a "delegated expertise" problem, in which the agent has an advantage in information acquisition relative to the principal, as opposed to having preexisting private information. When the principal is ex ante predisposed towards some action, it is optimal for her to hire an agent who is predisposed towards the same action, but to a smaller extent, since such an agent would acquire more information, which outweighs the bias stemming from misalignment. We show that belief misalignment between an agent and a principal is a viable instrument in delegation, performing on par with contracting and communication in a class of problems.
Approval vs. Participation Quorums (with with Dmitriy Vorobyev and Azamat Valei): R&R in European Journal of Political Economy
available here
Using a pivotal costly voting model of elections between a status quo and a challenger alternative, we compare participation and approval quorum requirements in terms of how they shape voter incentives to cast votes, and how they ultimately impact voter turnout, election outcomes, and welfare. We first show that approval and participation quorum restrictions of equal strictness result in at most two types of stable non-trivial equilibria: “abstention,” in which status quo supporters strategically abstain from voting, and “coordination,” in which they vote with positive probability. While abstention equilibria are always identical in the two quorum settings, coordination equilibria may differ, but only when the cost of voting is sufficiently low and status quo support among voters is neither extremely high or low, nor is it close to the degree of support for the challenger. We show that, in those cases, the difference in the outcomes of interest between approval and participation quorum settings is quantitatively small. The main difference between the two settings therefore arises from the fact that, under an approval quorum, coordination equilibrium exists for a narrower range of status quo support levels than under a participation quorum. We discuss the implications of these findings for designing optimal quorum restrictions, suggesting that choosing an approval quorum over a participation quorum and setting its strictness close to half of the number of voters, or setting no quorum restrictions at all, are often welfare maximizing choices.
Published work
Logit, CES, and rational inattention (Economics Letters, 2020)
Mathematical Note on the Value Positivity for Matrix Game (International Game Theory Review, 2020; with Victoria Kreps)
Attentional role of quota implementation (Journal of Economic Theory, 2021; with Sergei Mikhalishchev)
Participation quorum when voting is costly (European Journal of Political Economy, 2022; with Dmitriy Vorobyev and Azamat Valei)
Sparking Curiosity or Tipping the Scales? Targeted Advertising with Consumer Learning (Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2023; with Egor Starkov)
Work in progress
Sequential Search with Endogenous Information Acquisition (with Pavel Ilinov, Salil Sharma, Elias Tsakas and Mark Voorneveld)