Victor Augias
Bienvenue !
I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Microeconomics at the University of Bonn.
My research focuses on mechanism design, information design and behavioral economics.
I obtained my PhD in economics at Sciences Po in 2023.
Here is my CV.
Contact:
University of Bonn, Institute for Microeconomics
Lennéstraße 37, 53113 Bonn, Germany
Research
Working papers
Non-market allocation mechanisms: Optimal design and investment incentives (with Eduardo Perez-Richet) New draft coming soon
We study how to optimally design non-market mechanisms for allocating scarce resources, taking into consideration agents' investment incentives. A principal wishes to allocate a resource of homogeneous quality, such as seats in a university, to a heterogeneous population of agents. She commits ex-ante to a possibly random allocation rule, contingent on a unidimensional characteristic of the agents she intrinsically values. The principal cannot resort to monetary transfers. Agents have a strict preference for allocation and can undertake a costly investment to improve their characteristic before it is revealed to the principal. We show that while random allocation rules have the effect of encouraging investment, especially at the top of the characteristic distribution, deterministic pass-fail allocation rules, such as exams with a pass grade, prove to be optimal.
Price discrimination with redistributive concerns (with Daniel Barreto and Alexis Ghersengorin) New draft coming soon
Consumer data can be used to sort consumers into different market segments, allowing a monopolist to charge different prices at each segment. We study consumer-optimal segmentations with redistributive concerns, i.e., that prioritize poorer consumers. Such segmentations are efficient but may grant additional profits to the monopolist, compared to consumer-optimal segmentations with no redistributive concerns. We characterize the markets for which this is the case and provide a procedure for constructing optimal segmentations given a strong redistributive motive. For the remaining markets, we show that the optimal segmentation is surprisingly simple: it generates one segment with a discount price and one segment with the same price that would be charged under no segmentation.
We study a persuasion problem in which a sender designs an information structure to induce a non-Bayesian receiver to take a particular action. The receiver, who is privately informed about his preferences, is a wishful thinker: he is systematically overoptimistic about the most favorable outcomes. We show that wishful thinking can lead to a qualitative shift in the structure of optimal persuasion compared to the Bayesian case, whenever the sender is uncertain about what the receiver perceives as the best-case outcome in his decision problem.