Publications
Dynamic Communication with Trading Commissions (Journal of Mathematical Economics, 2026)- Slides, Online Appendix
This paper studies a dynamic cheap-talk communication game to investigate the role of trading commissions in broker-investor relationships. An investor’s optimal portfolio mix is fixed and privately known to a broker. The stochastic evolution of the portfolio-mix can be adjusted by the investor at a fixed cost paid to the broker. I consider two cases - whether the broker (sender) can or cannot send uninformative messages to the investor (receiver). In the Markov-Perfect Equilibria, the portfolio mix has an informational value to the investor because it influences the broker’s incentives for truth-telling. The presence of uninformative messages further restricts the set of such ‘truth-telling’ portfolio-mix-values. As the investor’s payoff from being informed becomes very large, and the sender is able to send uninformative messages, the only pure-strategy equilibrium involves no informative communication, and any informative equilibrium involves delays in communication. I also study an extension with proportional adjustment costs.
Do younger siblings get to have all the fun? Time use and birth order in Indian children and adolescents (Journal of Family Studies, 2026) - with Sila Mishra
Are younger siblings afforded more leisure time, while first-borns shoulder greater household responsibilities? Does being the eldest automatically translate into a heavier caregiving and domestic workload, or do these expectations differ for boys and girls? We analyse India’s Time Use Survey 2019 and compare how first-born and second-born children (ages 6–17) in two-sibling households allocate their time. On average, second-born children spend less time on unpaid altruistic work, employment, and learning while devoting more time to recreational activities. However, gender and sibling composition shape these differences. For instance, when the first-born is a girl, second-born children regardless of gender spend significantly less time on unpaid altruistic activities and more on leisure. In contrast, when the first-born is a boy, second-born sons spend less time on unpaid altruistic work and more on employment and leisure than their elder brothers, but second-born daughters in these households spend more time on unpaid altruistic activities and less on employment and leisure. We further assess whether house-hold characteristics such as income, family size, cooking technology, and urban-rural residence shape these patterns.
Research In Progress
Designing Information about Co-workers' Successes (presented at AMES-2024, ACEGD-2025, 7th Annual Economics Conference at Ahmedabad University)
Firms consist of teams of workers whose effort often impacts the team as a whole positively, and others' progress, either positively or negatively. Firms can also design how much information should workers have access to when each worker can generate private successes for themselves and the firm. Should workers know when other workers are successful? I study cases when each worker can generate at most one success for themselves and the firm, and where the workers' incentives only depend on the expected number of successful co-workers. This simplifies and reduces the dimensionality of the information-design problem of the firm. I obtain the optimal information policy for the firm for general cross-worker effects. As specific examples, I show that the optimal information policy is to delay full information till a probabilistic time in the case of complementary effort, and provide full information in case of substitutable effort.
How do Widows spend their Time?: The Effect of Spousal Death on Elderly Widows' Time-use - with Bipasha Maiti and Sila Mishra
We study how the spousal demise impacts the time use patterns of older women in India. Using panel data from the Consumer Pyramids Household Survey (CMIE-CPHS) and exploiting transitions into widowhood among women aged 57 and above, we estimate the causal impact of spousal loss on time allocation across household work, employment, leisure, and self-related activities. We find that widowhood leads to an immediate decline in time spent on household work and an increase in activities for self, while leisure gradually rises over time, particularly through home-based activities such as indoor entertainment. These adjustments are not explained by changes in health and are largely concentrated among widows rather than other household members within the household. Additional analysis highlights the importance of proximity to kin networks in shaping these responses. Consistent with a broader reconfiguration of gender roles, widowers increase their participation in household work following spousal loss, pointing to a restructuring of gendered divisions of labor in later life.
Conflict escalation in the Tullock Model: Role of Asymmetric Costs - with Priyanka Khosla
Dynamic Information Acquisition with Trading Commissions - Slides
I study a dynamic game between an investor and a broker with delegated information acquisition. The investor wants to maintain her portfolio of risky assets at an optimal benchmark level, which is stochastic and unobservable. The broker has the ability to generate public information about the benchmark at a cost, and earns a fixed commission whenever the investor changes her portfolio. I compare this to the case where the investor is able to acquire information herself, and show that with information power, the broker delays information acquisition and the investor increases her trade likelihood. This characterizes the inefficiency in the broker’s actions as compared to the case with the optimal contract, which is a direct payment for research.
Reputational Cheap Talk
I study a dynamic model of reputational cheap talk in which a constant state determines whether a crisis will or will not occur at some random time in the future. Conditional on his ability, a sender becomes increasingly informed about this constant state. A low-ability sender does not receive any information but can send false reports to appear informed. The sender gets a high payoff if the passive receiver's beliefs put more weight on him being of high-ability. I characterize the distribution of the time of false reports by the low-ability sender and show that the distribution of false reports, which the sender makes to pretend that he has become informed, put more weight on earlier times than the true distribution for a high-ability sender. An application on reports by financial experts suggests that they may tend to over-enthusiastically report possible events such as stock booms or crises in order to appear highly skilled.