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.
Embedded Files
Working papers
Screening in digital monopolies (with Elia Sartori)
[draft available upon request] [slides]
A defining feature of digital goods is that replication and damaging are costless: once a high-quality good is produced, lower-quality versions can be created and distributed at no additional cost. This paper studies screening in markets for digital goods. Unlike in quality-based screening \`a la Mussa and Rosen (1978), production costs only depend on the highest quality supplied and are not separable across delivered qualities. The monopolist allocation exhibits two interdependent inefficiencies. First, a productive inefficiency arises: the monopolist underinvests in the highest quality relative to the efficiency benchmark. Second, a distributional inefficiency implies that low types receive a damaged version of the produced good. The welfare comparison between monopoly and competition is ambiguous. While competition exacerbates productive inefficiency, it improves distributional efficiency relative to monopoly.
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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