"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 optimal mechanism for incentivizing information acquisition and truthful reporting involves approaching agents sequentially without revealing any history and hiring as soon as possible.

An agent’s incentive problem features a trade-off between a majority effect—reporting truthfully and joining the large group whose recommendations align with the principal’s posterior with high probability but, conditional on such alignment, facing a lower chance of being hired from that large group—and a minority effect—misreporting and joining the small group whose recommendations align with the principal’s posterior with low probability but, conditional on alignment, facing a higher chance of being hired. The minority effect arises only when an agent is pivotal, which occurs with very low probability, so the majority effect typically prevails. However, if the principal is overconfident about the precision of her private information, the minority effect is amplified, and agents gain an additional incentive to second-guess the principal’s belief—both channels distort incentives for truthful reporting.

1. "Trade without Money Transfer: the Role of Asymmetric Information".

2. "Strategic Innovation and Quitting".  

3. "Sequential Solicitation of the Order of Visiting".

4. "The Top Trading Cycles Mechanism and Allocative Efficiency of Inherited Indivisible Objects" (with Jinpeng Ma). 

1. "When Is the Deferred Acceptance Mechanism Responsive to Priority-based Affirmative Action?" (with Zhenhua Jiao and Guoqiang Tian), Social Choice and Welfare (2022), 58, 257-282. 

2. "School Choice with Priority-based Affirmative Action: A Responsive Solution" (with Zhenhua Jiao), Journal of Mathematical Economics (2021), 92, 1-9. (Lead article)

3. "On responsiveness of top trading cycles mechanism to priority-based affirmative action" (with Zhenhua Jiao), Economics Letters (2020), 186, 108545. 

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), 47(3), 190-196. [online appendix]