Gaining Credibility through Copying in Media, 2025 View PDF 

Abstract: This paper considers a finite number of information senders, each with a private signal about the true state of nature. They send a message to a receiver which the receiver uses to form beliefs of the state. The senders are interested in the receiver believing their message to be plausible ex-ante (credibility) as well as the accuracy of their message ex-post, while the receiver is interested in taking an action that matches the true state. I show it is a Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium for the first sender to report their signal honestly, for the other senders to copy the message of the first sender, and for the receiver to trust the message of the majority of the senders. As there is dishonesty among senders, the likelihood that a receiver makes a correct decision is affected negatively as compared to if all the senders reported their signals truthfully.

An Incentive-Compatible Utilitarian Voting Procedure for Permanent Citizens' Assemblies, with Marcus Pivato, 2025 View PDF 

Abstract: We consider a committee of voters randomly drawn from a larger population facing an infinite sequence of voting decisions, akin to a citizen jury. We propose a new voting mechanism for such juries where each voter has a privately known von Neumann-Morgenstern (vNM) utility function over social alternatives in each decision, and is asked to declare a real-valued ‘valuation’ for each alternative of a decision. We further impose a probability of being removed from the committee for the next decision dependent on the declaration of a voter. If a voter is removed, then they are replaced by some non-committee member from the larger population. We show that when the voters’ discount factor is large enough, imposing a probability equal to a scalar multiple of the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves tax leads to truthful revelation by the voters and consequently utilitarian efficient outcomes at a Bayesian Nash equilibrium.

Quadratically Normalized Utilitarian Voting, with Marcus Pivato, 2025  View PDF 

Abstract: We propose a new voting mechanism in which voters simultaneously report their von Neumann-Morgenstern (vNM) utility functions across multiple decision problems, each of which has a finite number of alternatives. Each voter must report a real-valued valuation" for each alternative of each decision. Each voter's valuation vector is rescaled to have unit magnitude (where this magnitude is measured using a specially constructed quadratic form). We show that it is a dominant strategy for each voter to reveal her true vNM utility function. With a very high probability, the mechanism selects the alternative that maximizes a weighted utilitarian social welfare function. Therefore, the mechanism thus achieves efficient outcomes while allowing voters to express the intensity of their preferences. The mechanism does not use money, and does not assume quasilinear utilities.