Working Papers

"Meritocracy in Hierarchical Organizations" (with Timm Behler)

Abstract: Competitive promotion mechanisms are often regarded as meritocratic because they select talented players with a high probability. We show that when incorporating promotion-contests into hierarchical organizations, this is not necessarily the case. If the organization’s middle tier can influence the career advancement of players below them, they may block the promotion of talented players out of fear that it could negatively affect their own career prospects. Uncompetitive seniority-based promotion schemes can alleviate this problem. Pessimistically, however, we identify a novel trade-off: the promotion scheme that maximizes expected ability at the middle manager level may not maximize the expected ability at the top tiers of the hierarchy. Whether this trade-off occurs in equilibrium depends crucially on (1) the average ability at the bottom of the hierarchy and (2) how well middle managers can infer the ability of their subordinates.

Work in Progress

"Fragile Men" (with Timm Behler) - partially funded 🎉 :  

A (mostly) experimental project on social image and opponent selection in competitions. 

"Discouraged by Competition!?" (with Timm Behler and Jens Ewald) - data collected 🎉, paper coming soon : 

An experimental project on how prize inequality affects effort provision.

"Contests for Perception" (with Timm Behler) :

A contest model with endogenous prizes in a psychological game theory framework.

"Loss-Constrained Lenders and Costly Income Verification":

Teasing out how peer-to-peer lending markets can be viable when strategic defaults are hard to punish.

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.