Pietro Dall'Ara
Research fellow, CSEF and University of Naples Federico II
My research is in economic theory. I obtained my PhD from Boston College in 2024 under the supervision of Mehmet Ekmekci.
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Working papers
Screening in digital monopolies (with Elia Sartori)
[draft available upon request] [slides]
A defining feature of digital goods is that damaging and replication are costless: once a high-quality good is produced, lower-quality versions can be created and distributed at no additional cost. We study markets for digital goods with privately informed consumers. Unlike in nonlinear pricing \'a la Mussa and Rosen (1978), production costs are nonseparable across qualities to capture free damaging and replication. Under monopoly, a new productive inefficiency emerges: the quality of high types is distorted due to an externality imposed by the highest quality on the overall allocation. As a result, the standard ``efficiency at the top'' result is weakened to distributional efficiency. The welfare comparison between monopoly and competition is ambiguous: while competition exacerbates productive inefficiency, it improves on monopoly in terms of distributional efficiency by making free versions available.
Coordination in complex environments ('23-'24 JMP)
Recipient of the 2024 LAGV prize
This paper introduces a framework to study coordination in highly uncertain environments. Coordination is an important aspect of innovative contexts, where: the more innovative a course of action, the more uncertain its outcome. To study the interplay of coordination and informational ``complexity'', this paper embeds a beauty-contest game into a complex environment. I identify a new conformity phenomenon. This effect may push towards exploration of unknown alternatives, or constitute a status quo bias, depending on the network structure of the players' interaction. Applications of the model include oligopoly pricing and centralization in organizations.
Persuading an inattentive and privately informed receiver
Revision requested at the Journal of Economic Theory
This paper studies the persuasion of a receiver who accesses information only if she exerts costly attention effort. A sender designs an experiment to persuade the receiver to take a specific action. The experiment affects the receiver's attention effort, that is, the probability that she updates her beliefs. As a result, persuasion has two margins: extensive (effort) and intensive (action). The receiver's utility exhibits a supermodularity property in information and effort. By leveraging this property, we establish a general equivalence between experiments and persuasion mechanisms \`a la Kolotilin et al.~(2017). In applications, the sender's optimal strategy involves censoring favorable states.
Work in progress
Insider information and information aggregation (with Alp Atakan and Mehmet Ekmekci)
Hosting the influencer (with Miguel Risco)
Double votes
Double votes are used in standard-setting organizations and unionization decisions. I study the ability of double votes to aggregate information dispersed among voters, in the sense of adopting the same policy as under symmetric information. A double vote aggregates information in situations in which a single vote fails to aggregate information.
Teaching material
PhD microeconomics
Graduate information economics
PhD game theory
Undergraduate game theory
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