Lucas Barros

Research

Quasi-Ironing

In many screening environments, buyers contract with firms while retaining the option to purchase additional units from other suppliers. When one firm is more efficient, it optimally captures all market demand, but pricing is disciplined by competition. The dominant firm's problem turns into a screening problem with a type-dependent pointwise lower bound on allocations. While this constraint is straightforward under regularity, standard ironing fails to preserve the problem's value or its optimal solutions in more general cases. This paper introduces quasi-ironing, a refinement based on quasiconvex rather than convex envelopes. Quasi-ironing restores the invariance properties of ironing in screening problems with pointwise lower or upper bounds. In the application, this method derives a tractable characterization of the equilibrium contracts and uncovers effects of competition that are absent from the regular case.

Distortion-free Screening Problems

 The Limits of Information Acquisition in Cheap Talk

Revise and Resubmit, Theoretical Economics

Can designing one’s own information substitute for commitment in communication? This paper studies a sender who commits to an information acquisition policy but communicates with a receiver through cheap talk. The main result shows that, for finite action spaces, acquisition design attains the Bayesian persuasion payoff for every prior if and only if classical cheap talk, with no acquisition design, already does. That is, whenever commitment to communication is essential for persuasion, designing the sender’s information alone is insufficient. The result clarifies the role of commitment in information design and identifies a limitation of endogenous information acquisition.