"Sequential Solicitation of Costly Information". 

Abstract: A principal with private information asks agents to acquire costly information and make action recommendations. An agent is then hired to implement his recommendation on the principal’s behalf. The principal wants the right action to be executed, while the agents want to get hired. The optimal mechanism for inducing information acquisition involves approaching agents sequentially without revealing any history and hiring as soon as possible. An agent’s incentive problem features what we call the pivotality effect: in situations where the agent’s report is pivotal, he may misreport to improve his chance of being hired. When the principal and the agents agree about the precision of her private information, this effect is outweighed by the gain from truthful reporting in situations where the agent is not pivotal, and both information acquisition and truthful reporting can be fully achieved when the cost of information acquisition is small. When the principal is overconfident about her signal precision, the pivotality effect is amplified, and the agent may misreport even when he is not pivotal, second-guessing the principal’s signal; adverse selection can then arise even when the cost is arbitrarily small. Two remedies restore truthful reporting: consulting enough agents, and separating advice from execution. When truthful reporting cannot be restored, a simple fallback that involves hiring a yes-man secures the principal’s payoff. 

1. "Strategic Innovation and Quitting".  

2. "Top Trading Cycles with Fixed-Quota Endowments: Monotonicity and Impossibility" (with Jinpeng Ma). 

3. "Sequential Solicitation of the Order of Visiting" (draft available soon). [abstract]

4. "Trade without Money Transfer", in progress

1. "When Is the Deferred Acceptance Mechanism Responsive to Priority-based Affirmative Action?" (with Zhenhua Jiao and Guoqiang Tian), Social Choice and Welfare (2022)

2. "School Choice with Priority-based Affirmative Action: A Responsive Solution" (with Zhenhua Jiao), Journal of Mathematical Economics (2021)

3. "On responsiveness of top trading cycles mechanism to priority-based affirmative action" (with Zhenhua Jiao), Economics Letters (2020)

4. "Affirmative action under common school priorities: The top trading cycles mechanism case" (with Yajing Chen, Zhenhua Jiao, and Guoqiang Tian), Operations Research Letters (2019) [online appendix]