Research
Research
My work sits at the intersection of Coase and Hurwicz. From Coase, I take the view that economic institutions are defined by the allocation of rights and the organization of exchange. From Hurwicz, I take the mechanism-design question: how can institutions process private information and incentives to support efficient outcomes? I use this perspective to revisit canonical impossibility results in trade, public goods, and market design, asking whether inefficiency reflects an unavoidable informational constraint or an institutional architecture that centralizes too much authority.
In particular, I revisit foundational results such as Myerson–Satterthwaite in bilateral trade and Green–Laffont in public-good provision. I ask whether their force derives not only from private information, but also from the institutional architecture of standard mechanism design, where the mechanism does not merely aggregate information but directly determines allocations, transfers, and surplus division.
This perspective separates incentive provision from the exercise of property rights. Many classical mechanisms embed a strong form of institutional authority: they assign final outcomes and payoff structures in ways that may themselves generate the strategic tensions later interpreted as impossibility results. My work studies what becomes possible when information aggregation, decision rights, and surplus determination are institutionally separated.
More broadly, this research aims to place mechanism design on a more explicitly institutional foundation. Rather than treating institutions as a neutral background for incentive design, I study how the allocation of decision rights, the boundaries of information, and the locus of surplus determination jointly determine implementability, efficiency, and incentive compatibility.
Can the Coase theorem be compatible with private information? The conventional view, inspired by the Myerson--Satterthwaite impossibility, is that it cannot. My answer in this paper is that it can. I show that the impossibility stems from the mismatch between payoff-relevant decision rights and access to private information in the centralized direct mechanism.
I develop a meeting-assignment mechanism that uses reported valuations to identify trading feasibility, while leaving surplus determination to decentralized bargaining. Under a frictionless Coasean bargaining benchmark, the mechanism is universally Bayesian-Nash incentive-compatible without outside subsidies, induces an intrinsically singleton meeting allocation under general conditions, and implements socially efficient meeting assignment. The Coasean benchmark is sufficient but not necessary: Bayesian incentive compatibility extends to a broader class of report-sensitive bargaining protocols.
Conference Presentation: EWMES (Dec 2025, Cyprus), CSW-AMES (Jan 2026, Abu Dhabi), NASMES (June 2026, Atlanta, USA), ESEM (August 2026, Dublin, Ireland)
This paper studies decentralized provision of harmless public goods under private information. I identify the pivotal-failure aversion rationale: a self-interested agent avoids actions that may cause the false failure of a provision opportunity she values when the requested contribution remains within her valuation.
I develop a residual-cost mechanism that supports efficient provision through individual feasibility questions, rather than valuation reports or assigned cost shares. Under pivotal-failure aversion, the mechanism preserves agents' monetary property rights, keeps feasible provision opportunities from being lost, and implements efficient provision in finite time whenever surplus is strictly positive.
Conference Presentation: TBA