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.
This paper reexamines the relation between the Myerson-Satterthwaite theorem and the Coase theorem in bilateral trade with private information. It argues that the inefficiency identified by the Myerson-Satterthwaite theorem does not stem from private information per se, but from a deterministic allocation rule that centralizes authority over surplus division. Such centralization generates a strategic externality that underlies the impossibility result.
The paper constructs a mechanism that separates information communication from surplus determination by conveying derived information while preserving decentralized price negotiation. The mechanism achieves incentive compatibility without outside subsidies and implements ex post efficient meeting assignments. The analysis reconciles Coasean bargaining with private information and expands the domain of mechanism design to institutional environments with decentralized authority and probabilistic indeterminacy within a Bayesian framework.
Conference Presentation: EWMES (Dec 2025, Cyprus), CSW-AMES (Jan 2026, Abu Dhabi), NASM (June 2026, Atlanta, USA), ESEM (August 2026, Dublin, Ireland, forthcoming)
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