Job Market Paper

Robustness and Simple Contracts in Sequential Screening 

How should a seller screen buyers when she observes the distribution of their valuations but not how each buyer learns them? Does the rich dynamic menu of contracts survive?

Abstract: Sellers often contract with buyers before buyers learn their valuations, but the contracts are simpler than Bayesian sequential screening predicts. We study a sequential-screening environment in which the seller knows demand but not how the buyer learns, and maximizes worst-case profit over all learning processes consistent with demand. Under natural conditions on cost and the shape of demand, the essentially unique robustly optimal mechanism is a single refund contract that the buyer always accepts. The value of sequential screening then comes from information about both learning and demand. We quantify this value and show that knowing how the buyer learns can raise both the seller's profit and total welfare.

• Short note on Courty and Li (2000) (with Eric Gao) (coming soon!)

Working Papers

• Attention Capture (with Andrew Koh)

Revise and Resubmit, Journal of Political Economy

How to optimally extract attention from platform users through dynamic information design?

• Robust Technology Regulation (with Andrew Koh)

Extended abstract in the 27th ACM conference on Economics and Computation

How should uncertain technologies be robustly regulated when a learning process is unknown?

• Persuasion and Optimal Stopping (with Andrew Koh and Weijie Zhong)

Extended abstract in the 27th ACM conference on Economics and Computation

A unified method for solving dynamic information design with optimal stopping

• Informational Puts (with Andrew Koh and Kei Uzui)

Extended abstract in the 25th ACM conference on Economics and Computation

A dynamic information design using only public signals can guarantee the best equilibrium in a dynamic coordination game with switching frictions.

• Technology Speed Limits (with Andrew Koh)

Follow-up to "Robust Technology Regulation" (with Andrew Koh) in which the agent endogenously chooses how fast to learn.

• Memory Correlated Equilibrium (with Andrew Koh)

How does memory affect equilibria in games? Memory structures can alleviate commitment issues.

Work in Progress

• Multiple Admission Tracks in the College Admissions Problem

When does a college prefer a multi-channel admissions policy to a test-only policy?

• Implementable Dynamic Information Structures under Outside Learning

To what extent can the information designer persuade a receiver who learns additional information from an outside source?