Research
Working Papers:
"Irreversibility, Complementarity, and the Dynamics of Public Good Provision" with Liuchun Deng, Minako Fujio and M. Ali Khan, updated January 2024. Online Appendix.
We study public good provision and technology investment when two parties, with differing values of the public good, alternate in power stochastically. In each period, the incumbent decides on public good provision and technological investment that lowers future costs of provision. We obtain the following results for Markov Perfect equilibria of the model. i) When polarization is low, the steady state distribution is unaffected by the degree of investment reversibility, but when polarization is high, the party favoring the public good invests more, with both par- ties providing more public good under irreversible investment. (ii) Higher turnover results in increased levels of technology stock and greater public good provision if polarization is low. (iii) Under high turnover, as parties become more polarized, the expected technology stock and public good provision decline initially, but jump upward as irreversibility starts to bind.
"Naked Exclusion with Heterogeneous Buyers" with Jan Zapal, updated February 2024.
We investigate the effects of buyer heterogeneity in a market where an incumbent firm prevents entry when it signs enough exclusionary contracts with buyers. With heterogeneous buyers, several well-known results in exclusionary contracting with homogenous buyers are overturned and novel ones emerge. First, inefficient equilibria exist in which exclusionary contracts are signed but entry still occurs, and the loss of consumer surplus falls on small buyers. Second, sequential contracting may be more pro-competitive than simultaneous contracting in the sense that entry occurs under sequential but not simultaneous contracting. When this happens, sequential Pareto dominates simultaneous contracting. We extend our analysis to consider downstream competition and breach of contract.
Even though people routinely ask experts for advice, they often have private information as well. This paper studies strategic communication when both the expert and the decision maker have private information. I analyze both one-way communication (only the expert reports) and two-way communication (the decision maker communicates first before the expert reports). In one-way communication, I find that non-monotone equilibria may arise (the expert conveys whether the state is extreme or moderate instead of low or high), even if preferences satisfy the single-crossing property. In two-way communication, the main question is whether the decision maker can extract more information from the expert by revealing her information first. In the course of answering this question, I derive comparative statics of the Crawford-Sobel equilibria with respect to the prior. I identify conditions under which truthful communication by the decision maker fails in equilibrium and discuss the possibility of informative communication by the decision maker.
Published Papers:
"Selecting Cheap-talk Equilibria" with Navin Kartik and Joel Sobel, Econometrica, January 2008, 117-136.
"Perturbed Communication Games with Honest Senders and Naive Receivers" Journal of Economic Theory, March 2011, 401-424.
"Value of Public Information in Sender-Receiver Games" Economics Letters, March 2012, 343-345.
"Informational Loss in Bundled Bargaining" with Hulya Eraslan, Journal of Theoretical Politics, July 2013, 338-362.
"Rhetoric in Legislative Bargaining with Asymmetric Information" with Hulya Eraslan, Theoretical Economics, May 2014, 483-513. Supplementary Appendix
"Effective Persuasion" with Wojciech Olszewski, International Economic Review, May 2014, 319-347.
"Mandatory versus Discretionary Spending: the Status Quo Effect" with Renee Bowen and Hulya Eraslan, American Economic Review, October 2014, 2941-2974. Supplementary Appendix
"Career Concerns and Excessive Risk Taking" Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, Spring 2015, 110-130.
"Information Transmission in Nested Sender-Receiver Games" with Sidartha Gordon, Economic Theory, Volume 58, Issue 3, 2015, 543-569.
(This paper supersedes an earlier paper "Optimism and Communication.")
"Dynamic Agenda Setting" with Hulya Eraslan, American Economic Journal - Microeconomics, May 2017, 1-32.
"Efficiency of Flexible Budgetary Institutions" with Renee Bowen, Hulya Eraslan, and Jan Zapal, Journal of Economic Theory, January 2017, 148-176.
"Learning While Setting Precedents" with Hulya Eraslan, RAND Journal of Economics, Winter 2020, 1222-1252.
"Sequential Vote Buying" with Jan Zapal, Journal of Economic Theory, October 2022, 105529. (longer working paper version)
"When to Ask for an Update: Timing in Strategic Communication" with Atara Oliver, Journal of Economic Theory, July 2023, 105676.
"Optimal Group Testing with Heterogeneous Risks" with Nina Bobkova and Hulya Eraslan, Economic Theory, January 2024, 413-444.