Robust Information Disclosure and Buyer Learning, June 2026
I study a robust model of information disclosure and pricing in a monopoly market with buyer learning. A seller offers an indivisible good to a buyer who is uncertain about his valuation and can acquire additional costly information from outside sources. The seller chooses a price and a signal, but does not know which additional signals are available to the buyer and maximizes a robust objective. I characterize the seller's optimal price and information structure when the cost of outside signals is monotone in the informativeness of the signal. I then provide comparative statics and show that greater uncertainty with regard to the informational environment of the buyer leads to more disclosure from the seller. Since this also changes the optimal price the seller charges, the effect on consumer surplus is ambiguous.
Prior-Free Delegation, September 2026
joint with Jan Napp and Wenjun Zheng
We consider a robust delegation problem in which the principal does not know the distribution from which the underlying state is drawn. The principal can choose a general randomized mechanism and maximizes her worst-case expected payoff over all state distributions. Our main result characterizes the robustly optimal mechanism. The mechanism has up to three regions: (i) accommodation, where the agent’s ideal action is taken, (ii) calibrated randomization, where each type receives a distinct lottery, and (iii) pooling, where all types receive the same lottery. We then extend our model to a multidimensional setting in which preferences are additively separable and satisfy a cross-dimensional symmetry condition, and show that delegating separately across dimensions is robustly optimal.
A Presynaptic Phosphosignaling Hub for Lasting Homeostatic Plasticity. With Müller JA, Betzin J, Oprisoreanu A-M, Engholm-Keller K, Mayer A, Paulußen I, Schönhense E, Gulakova P, Gschossmann LJ, Wark JR, Lamprecht A, Becker AJ, Waardenberg AJ, Graham ME, Dietrich D, Schoch S. Cell Reports 39:110696 (2022).