Hello and welcome to my research page!
I received my doctorate from the University of Bonn in 2020 and went to work in the private sector afterward. However, I still dabble in economic research in my spare time, focussing on economic theory applied to finance questions.
Email: imap.aspeit@gmail.com
This paper studies a first-price common-value auction in which bidders do not know the number of their competitors. In contrast to the case of common-value auctions with a known number of rival bidders, the inference from winning is not monotone, and a ``winner's blessing'' emerges at low bids. As a result, bidding strategies may not be strictly increasing, but instead may contain atoms. Moreover, an equilibrium fails to exist when the expected number of competitors is large and the bid space is continuous. Therefore, we consider auctions on a grid. On a fine grid, high-signal bidders follow an essentially strictly increasing strategy, whereas low-signal bidders pool on two adjacent bids on the grid. The solutions of a ``communication extension'' based on Jackson et al. (2002) capture the equilibrium bidding behavior in the limit, as the grid becomes arbitrarily fine.
The equity lending and option market both allow investors to decouple voting and cash flow rights of common shares. We provide a theory of this decoupling. While either market enables investors to acquire voting rights without cash flow exposure, empirical studies demonstrate a substantial difference in implied vote prices. Our model explains this surprising difference by uncovering the mechanism by which vote prices in the equity lending market are endogenously lower than those implied by the option market. We show that even though votes are cheaper in the equity lending market, activists endogenously choose to purchase votes in both markets.
We analyze auctions in which the bidders' valuation for the good depends on both common and private-value components and bidders are either informed or uninformed about the common component. Due to the multidimensionality, the value of the good and the bids are not affiliated, and traditional arguments cannot guarantee the existence of an equilibrium. Specifically, if the item is sold in a second-price auction and the private-value distribution is discrete, there may be no equilibrium, (Jackson 2009). On the contrary, we show that when the private-value distribution is continuous, an equilibrium exists and every equilibrium is strictly increasing in both dimensions. We also establish the existence of an equilibrium in the first-price auction, independent of the private-value distribution.
We consider the sale of a single indivisible common-value good in a dy- namic market where short-lived buyers arrive over time. Buyers observe pri- vate signals about the value. The seller is initially uninformed and proposes the terms of trade. As time passes, all players learn about the value from delay in trade. Importantly, this learning process depends on what is made pub- lic about buyer-seller interactions. We compare the division of surplus across three transparency regimes that differ with respect to whether buyers observe the seller’s past actions or time-on-the-market. When the seller’s time-on-the- market but not the seller’s past actions are observable, and if buyers’ signals are sufficiently rich, then there is no perfect Bayesian equilibrium where the seller extracts the full surplus. In the other two regimes, where buyers observe either everything or nothing about the seller’s past actions and time-on-the-market, the seller extracts the full surplus in at least one equilibrium, no matter the signal structure.