Panagiotis Kyriazis

We investigate the relationship between product offerings, information dissemination, and consumer decision-making in a monopolistic screening environment in which consumers lack private information about their valuation of quality-differentiated products. An intermediary, who is driven by the objective of maximizing consumer surplus but is also biased towards high-quality products, provides recommendations after the monopolist announces the menu of product choices. We characterize the monopolist’s profit-maximizing finite-item menu. Our results show that as intermediaries place greater emphasis on consumer surplus over product quality, sellers are prompted to strategically expand their product range. Intriguingly, this augmented product variety decreases economic efficiency compared to scenarios where direct seller-to-consumer information provision is the norm. The role of information intermediaries proves pivotal in shaping consumer welfare, market profitability, and overarching economic efficiency. Our insights underscore the complexities introduced by these intermediaries that policymakers and market designers must consider when designing policies centered on consumer learning and market information transparency. 

Coordination facilitation and efficient decision-making are two essential components of successful leadership. In this paper, we take an informational approach and investigate how followers' information impacts coordination and efficient leadership in a model featuring a leader and a team of followers. We show that efficiency is achieved as the unique rationalizable outcome of the game when followers possess sufficiently imprecise information. In contrast, if followers have accurate information, the leader may fail to coordinate them toward the desired outcome or even take an inefficient action herself. We discuss the implications of the results for the role of leaders in the context of financial fragility and crises.

We study the effectiveness of information manipulation by regimes within the framework of a regime-change global game. Contrary to previous findings, our analysis suggests that costly information manipulation may not necessarily enhance the regime's survival prospects when faced with uprisings. This finding parallels the findings of the signal-jamming literature in economics, where costly actions do not alter equilibrium outcomes but are undertaken nonetheless due to strategic considerations. Our study highlights a novel aspect of the possibility of manipulating information, for instance, via propaganda, where the regime, despite being informed about its strength, falls into a trap of its own making.