Working Papers

"Contests for Perception" 

Abstract: We observe competitive behavior in different domains of society, even without explicit monetary prizes. In this paper, I model a mechanism that may drive such behavior: I study a contest model where prizes are given by an inactive observer’s posterior belief about a player’s ability. In other words, prizes are determined endogenously in the model. I define the equilibrium in this game and show how expected effort changes with two exogenous parameters: the probability of an agent being high ability and the difference in productive ability between types. I show that expected effort is maximized when uncertainty about players’ abilities is the highest. I identify a novel encouragement effect of ability asymmetry. Total expected effort can increase in ability asymmetry: when the prizes are determined in equilibrium, the discouragement effect from ability heterogeneity can be reversed when heterogeneity is sufficiently low. I also analyze win probabilities when allowing for the observer’s prior to depend on players’ identities: I identify the “underdog effect” where initially decreasing the prior belief about the ability of the player with lower expected ability can nonetheless increase her win probability.

"The Merits of Meritless Promotions" (formerly: "Meritocracy in Hierarchical Organizations") with Timm Behler

"Discouraged by Competition?!" with Timm Behler and Jens Ewald

Work in Progress

"Fragile Men" with Timm Behler - fully funded 🎉, in the lab soon 

"Energy Prices and Environmental Politics" with Jens Ewald 

"Personal Agency and Preferences for Redistribution"

Pre-PhD Publications

"A variational-autoencoder approach to solve the hidden profile task in hybrid human-machine teams." with Niccoló Pescetelli and Alex Rutherford. 2022. PloS one, 17(8), e0272168.