Hi, my name is Siwen Liu (刘斯文). I'm currently a 6th year PhD student in Economics at University of Bonn. I am on the 2026-2027 job market. I'm fortunate to be supervised by Prof. Benny Moldovanu and Prof. Daniel Krähmer.
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My research interests are in mechanism design, contract theory and microeconomic theory.
Contact: siwen.liu@uni-bonn.de
Working Papers
Working Papers
Abstract: We study a moral hazard problem with adverse selection in which a risk-neutral agent can directly control the output distribution and possesses private information about the production environment. The principal designs a menu of contracts, subject to limited liability, to induce effort. Departing from classical models, the principal can not only induce specific levels of effort but also regulate the supports of the implemented output distributions through contract design. We characterize the set of implementable output distributions in this environment. We provide sufficient conditions for the optimality of pooling and screening. In the latter case, it is necessary that the supports of the output distributions overlap only to a limited extent.
Abstract: We study random selling with endogenous quality investments under monopoly and duopoly competition. Sellers choose a distribution of product qualities, incur moment-based production costs, and may sell products through lotteries. Under monopoly, we study the structure of optimal production plans and identify conditions under which product lines exhibit gaps or supply a continuum of qualities. We show that there always exists an optimal production plan whose selling mechanism involves at most one lottery, and provide sufficient conditions for deterministic selling. Under duopoly competition with market clearing prices, every pure-strategy equilibrium is symmetric when sellers are identical and production costs are convex. In this setting, lotteries are unnecessary under a regular value distribution, while without regularity there exists an equilibrium in which each seller offers at most one lottery.
Publications
Induced Rules for Minimum Cost Spanning Tree Problems: towards Merge-proofness and Coalitional Stability with Peter Borm and Henk Norde International Journal of Game Theory (2025)
Work in Progress
Flexible Moral Hazard with Dual Costs with Daniel Krähmer
Abstract: We study a flexible moral hazard problem in which a principal contracts with a risk-neutral agent who directly chooses an output distribution and is protected by limited liability. We introduce dual costs, a class of production costs analogous to Yaari's dual utility and defined through a convex transformation of the output distribution’s survival function. We reduce the principal’s problem to pointwise maximization, derive optimal wage schedules, and examine the structure of optimal output distributions. We also identify sufficient conditions for the optimality of linear contracts. Moreover, We provide a foundation for dual costs through a production process in which the agent uses privately observed information to assign outputs across heterogeneous states. Building on this foundation, we establish an equivalence between the moral hazard problem with hidden action and a standard screening problem with hidden information.
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