Boris Knapp

I am an applied economist specializing in industrial organization and behavioral economics. I am interested in how information asymmetries shape market outcomes and their implications for welfare and policy design. To study these questions, I use theoretical models, observational data, and experiments.

This website hosts the academic research I remain involved in outside my current position. All views are my own.

I currently work as an economist at the Austrian Federation of Social Insurances. Before that I was an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Economics at the Corvinus University of Budapest. I received my PhD from the University of Vienna in 2023.

Links: CV, Google Scholar, Linkedin profile.

Research Interests:

Microeconomics

Industrial Organization

Behavioral Economics

Information Economics

E-mail:

boris(dot)knapp(at)uni(dash)corvinus(dot)hu

Publications:

"Fake reviews and naive consumers", 2026, The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization

Online reviews affect consumer choices and are therefore frequently faked. Not all consumers are aware of this. In a model with fake reviews and naive consumers, the unique equilibrium is characterised by partial pooling, where fake reviews are persuasive and blend in with real ones. Raising consumer awareness has opposing effects on the naive and aware consumer groups. If real reviews are written strategically, they are not always truthful. Under favourable market conditions, the equilibrium with all strategic reviewers is outcome equivalent to one with all aware consumers. Thus, awareness campaigns can yield similar outcomes, regardless of their target audience.

"The impact of misinformation on consumer choices" (with Dominik Stelzeneder), 2026, Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics

Misinformation - such as fake reviews or biased recommendations - poses a challenge for consumers that can be conceptualized as a two-step problem: First, they need to judge the credibility of the signal. Second, they need to update their prior beliefs conditional on their judgment and the signal realization. This paper reports on an experiment that disentangles both steps utilizing a novel approach that requires neither belief elicitation nor structural estimation of utility parameters. We utilize a mixed design, comparing subjects' decisions in one of three treatments to their individually optimal decision. The sequential nature of our experiment allows us to design a task that elicits the individually optimal decision directly. While we find no overall treatment effects, we uncover substantial heterogeneity: the interventions improved decision accuracy for male participants and for those with higher cognitive ability and education, but had no significant effect on others.

Working Papers:

"Perverse Effects of Imperfectly Enforced Price Controls" (with Ágoston Reguly) [preliminary first draft]

We study the effects of a rent control policy when enforcement relies on tenant complaints rather than government monitoring. We show theoretically that when tenants differ in their ability to enforce the rent cap, adverse selection arises: landlords set rents anticipating how enforcement risk depends on the composition of tenants. Higher listed rents deter tenants who are unlikely to enforce the cap, increasing enforcement risk and inducing further rent increases. The resulting equilibrium rents are higher than in the no regulation benchmark and depend negatively on the rent cap level. Using rental listings data from Vienna between 2012 and 2022, we test the model's predictions by exploiting policy changes and institutional variation in rent caps. We find that tighter rent control leads to 76 EUR higher posted rents on average, consistent with our theoretical predictions.

"Playing Hard to Get: Scarcity as a Sales Strategy" (with Vyacheslav Arbuzov) [first draft]

We consider a monopoly model in which the current demand depends positively on the excess demand in the previous period, and solve the monopolist’s dynamic optimization problem. When the demand-boosting effect and/or the discount factor are small enough, the monopolist clears the market every period. When both are sufficiently high, the optimal policy is cyclical, consisting of periods with low prices and low supply, during which demand is built up, followed by a period with high price and high supply, during which the monopolist ‘cashes in’ on the hype he has created. The length of the optimal cycle is unique and depends positively on the demand-boosting effect and discount factor. We also study welfare effects in the case where the demand-boosting effect is part of consumer surplus, and in the case where it is not. A stronger demand-boosting effect can increase total welfare in both cases.

Work in Progress:

Costless Talk About Cost (with Maxim Ivanov)

A sender has private information about a monopolist's marginal cost. Under which conditions is informative communication possible? How much information is optimal with respect to social welfare?

Price Discrimination via Waiting Lists

False Advertising with Ex-Post Liability (with Naoki Fujiwara)

References:

Maarten Janssen

Maxim Ivanov

Hubert Janos Kiss