Research

We examine democratic public-good provision with heterogeneous legislators. Decisions are taken by majority rule and an agenda-setter proposes a level of the public good, taxes, and subsidies. Members are heterogeneous with respect to their benefits from the public good. We find that, depending on the status quo public-good level, the agenda-setter will form a coalition with the agents who most desire, or least desire, the public good, and we may observe `strange bedfellow' coalitions. Moreover, public-good provision is a non-monotonic function of the status quo public-good level. In the dynamic setting, public-good provision fluctuates endogenously, even if the agenda-setter stays the same over time. Moreover, the more polarized the legislature is, the higher is the volatility of public-good provision and the longer it may take for a society to recover from negative shocks to public-good provision. We illustrate these findings for a two-party system with polarized parties.

A set of agents has to make a decision about the provision of a public good and its financing. Agents have heterogeneous values for the public good and each agent's value is private information. An agenda-setter has the right to make a proposal about a public-good level and a vector of contributions. For the proposal to be approved, only the favourable votes of a subset of agents are needed. If the proposal is not approved, a type-dependent outside option is implemented. I characterize the optimal public-good provision and the coalition-formation for any outside option in dominant strategies. Optimal public-good provision might be a non-monotonic function of the outside option public-good level. Moreover, the optimal coalition might be a non-convex set of types.

This paper seeks to explore the potential trade-off arising between the theories of Equality of Opportunity and Opportunity Pluralism. Whereas the first theory has received much attention in the literature on Welfare Economics, the second one has only recently been introduced with the publication of the book by Joseph Fishkin, Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity. After arguing extensively that any notion of human flourishing is incompatible with traditional theories of Equality of Opportunity, the author proposes an alternative theory squarely based on a broad notion of human development. This paper seeks to formalize the argument made in this book through the lens of economic theory. My analysis suggests that traditional theories of Equality of Opportunity are not incompatible with Opportunity Pluralism.

Platform Design and Product Quality (with Berno Büchel and Enrico Maria Fenoaltea) 

Product quality is crucial for consumer surplus and welfare. When firms sell on a platform, their tradeoff between costs and benefits of quality is affected. A platform not only defines the fee structure, but also which products are presented more prominently than others. Do these features induce the right incentives for product quality? We introduce a simple model to address this question. Firms decide on their product quality and price, while the platform determines how these choices map into the probability of making the customers aware of the product. Anticipating the symmetric Nash equilibrium among firms, the profit-maximizing platform chooses a transaction fee, a value fee, and the exponent parameter in a Tullock-like algorithm that rewards product quality. A transaction fee, or per-unit fee, would not distort the quality choices, but the platform does not use this instrument. It prefers to reward quality, which creates a contest for consumer attention that distorts quality upwards, and to simultaneously charge a value fee, which distorts product quality downwards. Both settings undermine welfare and result in net under-provision of product quality. Robustness of these insights is discussed in several model extensions.